Praia

Hello! Sorry its been a while since we have blogged. Time seems to fly by awfully fast here. Its hard to believe we only have a little over 2 weeks left. We're glad that we've made the most of our time here, yet there still seems to be so many things left that we wanted to do! 

On our way to "lala"

Fortunately, one of those things was go to a beach that was a tad nicer than the one across the street from Bethel i.e. not covered with trash. Last weekend a brother in our hall asked if we would like to go with him and his family to a beach. We enthusiastically agreed! I've decided I'm calling this beach "lala" because when we asked Joao Paulo (the brother who brought us) where the beach was, he said its "la la" which means sort of "over there." There's no official name for the site I guess, and I honestly have no idea how he even found the beach in the first place. Its in the middle of nowhere.  You literally drive down a road for a while, then keep driving down the dirt road, full of "ondas" which are like huge waves of speed bumps in a pothole filled dirt road (not a ride for those who suffer from motion sickness). Then you take a right down a smaller dirt road, through a village, then through a field, through some bushes and all of a sudden you're on the beach! 

This beach was unlike any I've been to before. Peaceful and serene do not even begin to fully capture the calm that surrounds you. We were the only people on the beach for a few hours. Around noon time a bunch of women came on the beach who were there to meet the fishermen coming in on their boats. The women take the fish, crabs, or shrimp that the fishermen have caught and haul it into town to sell. We stuck around for a while to choose our dinner. 

Fishermen coming in to sell their catch

Ian's first clam

In the meantime we were digging for clams on the beach and were fairly successful as a group (I only found 1 or 2, but I'm pretty sure that is relative to the effort I put into digging for them. Clam digging. Not my thing). We gathered maybe 1lb or so on our own and then bought another 3lbs from one of the women. We call these clams, but they tasted more like mussels to me. Their shells were really thick though and they did look like clams. Either way they were the most delicious clams/mussels I've ever had! 

This is the lady we bought the rest of the clams from.
Cutest baby on her back.

While "shopping" around for our fish/crabs, we saw some interesting catches. One fishermen had a huge eel, about 6-7' long which he was repeatedly bashing against his boat to kill it. Interesting. There were all kinds of big fish the fishermen were offering, but I thought this little boy had the most interesting catch. 

He was playing with it in the water like it was a toy boat or something. Poor fish :( 

We decided on some crabs. I suppose we could have caught about 5 bazillion little crabs on the beach, because there were that many. I kid you not. Check out this video. If you look towards the horizon you will see them. They were EVERYWHERE. Fortunately they seemed to scatter and run once you stepped in their general direction. Still, I was not a fan. 

However, I was glad that I had not come face to face or toe to pincher with any of these slightly larger crabs we planned to eat... 

Lucas (Joao Paulo's son) had his own catch he carried around. 


All in all it was a great morning. We headed out to cook up our fresh catches. However, Joao Paulo decided he had a hankering for chicken and french fries instead. To our surprise we stopped at Costa do Sol on our way home. Its a sort of famous restaurant right on the beach. You can tell its sort of famous because I've never seen so many foreigners in one place here! I am quite glad we did because it was a fantastic meal. Sangria,  salad, calamari, and a massive plate of fish, shrimp, lobster and french fries. 

Needless to say we were all stuffed by the time we left. Fortunately we were past the biggest "waves" in the road, otherwise that would not have been such a pleasant drive back! 


We went back to their house and had crepes with honey and cinnamon for dessert. Then we watched Happy Feet 2 together. It was great. 


Since we were so stuffed from the restaurant, the family insisted we come back Tuesday after meeting to eat all the clams and crab we had bought. 

That was a fun night. We ate the most delicious clams ever and listened to fardo music. I think I forgot to mention this family is from Portugal. Joao Paulo works for a European company that has various branches around the world. When he heard they were considering a Mozambique office, he and his wife and son volunteered to be sent here. They've been here about a year and love it. There are quite a few families in our congregation who have moved here from Portugal in order to help in the field ministry. They are a great asset to the congregation. 


After all that talk about food I'm starving! Hope everyone has a great weekend. More later!