Pics from Maputo

All my good pictures were lost when baggage handler thieves in Johannesburg stole my mom's and the project's digital cameras (and my cellphone) out of my checked bag en route to Zambia. So all we have are pics of the meeting, boring! I do have 1.5 seconds of excellent video of our M&E guy doing a Zulu dance and we'll see if I can figure out how to put that up. And EA will provide pics of our ill-fated cruise a bit later....along with the story I still have to write.

The Maputo meeting went really well, I think, and we accomplished most of our goals. The town is quite nice, pretty deserted but with tall office buildings and apartment buildings that are more or less covered in mildew. There are a number of good restaurants, including Micasa, which serves excellent caipirinhas and ostrich medallions. Yum! You can find prawns everywhere, butterflied and grilled with lots of butter, and the South Africans have opened a bunch of chain restaurants and clubs à la TGI Fridays or a mini African House of Blues. The first evening we saw some Portugese jazz at a place that had a faux treehouse quality to it, with vines and leafyness and a real rubber tree growing up out of the courtyard. The band sat in front of a large fake clamshell and there were five big video screens showing two different camera angles.

There was a really really good Indian restaurant not far from the hotel, and the Natural History Museum was AWESOME - stuffed lions and zebras and antelopes and civet cats and a coelacanth (Wikipedia here). Coelacanths are prehistoric fish that everyone thought were extinct until fishermen caught one off the coast of Madagascar, and then Indonesia, in the 20th century. They have little legs and look like Far Side cartoons (they also give birth to live young called pups!).

The museum was great - huge - with fish and mammals and insects, including our beloved anopheles. There were big wood carvings of cellular biology and the prehistoric time periods, with dinosaurs and cavemen. One wall had about 8 elephant fetuses of varying ages (cool!). And - all the animals were eating one another! The lion was perched on the back of the zebra, in the correct position to bite through the spinal cord. Areana said "Wow, that's great - lions are trying to be humane by killing the zebra quickly!" Always the party pooper, I pointed out that it's just more efficient for the lion to not waste a lot of energy mauling the zebra to death.

That's it for now - off to Puerto Rico tomorrow very early! Thank goodness the flight is out of Reagan and not Dulles, like I'd originally thought. In fact, I thought that Reagan and Dulles were the SAME until I checked my flight info last week. It's ok, you can laugh. I don't mind. :)