Category Archives: Angola

Warren, Another Braai, Bellas – Luanda!

So, weekend has finally arrived. Thank goodness! The last 2 days have been seriously long and hectic with this bloody FPSO network DHCP issue! 2 Long Nights, and long day on Saturday! 🙁

Rubbish - 01

A typical roadside scene of rubbish everywhere.

Warren, a new engineer arrived on Saturday, and I went straight from work to pick him up. Sly and I were still dealing with this DHCP issue. After two 16 hour days, we found ourselves back at work at 09h on Sat! Not fun!

Warren is from Namibia, though previously from Cape Town. He has worked in Zambia, Mauritania and a few other countries in Africa, so should handle Angola just fine. He seems like a nice dude, having met him briefly at DD in CPT when I was there. He has just been on IPT training, so hopefully he can add some more support to our environment, though he is actually here for another project. An IPT project. Surprise, Surprise!

We celebrated with another braai, of which Blythe pulled in with another dude Bradley, who is managing the cabling of the new BP building. Also a fellow Capetonian. Cool!

More good meat, and more G&T’s! 🙂

Another late night followed by an early morning. We were planning on getting out to Mussulo, but it didn’t happen due to the rain. It had been raining the entire night before, on and off of course, and Blythe cancelled the trip due the chaos that would ultimately ensue on the roads.

We (Sly, Warren and myself) headed out to Bellas to go shopping, and do a bit of looking and grab a late-ish lunch. We headed through to Shoprite to change a bit of cash. However Shoprite Cambio was closed. Man, this was bad, as we had a sum total of about  4000 Kz between us for lunch, as the chick there did say that if the Cambio was closed, they would take Dollars at the checkout counter. R400?? Man, that’s plenty! Wrong! That’ll get like 3 of us a roll and a coke each! We checked out the prices at Portugalia, and figured we could get 3 burgers, and 3 drinks and have about 400kz left over. Yeah, 1000kz per burger and about 200kz per soft drink. Uh, yes, that is R100 per burger!!! 🙁

So I ordered, which once again was a bit of a farce as the dude didn’t speak English, and had to get the chick doing the drinks to help him out. After waiting at our table for about 30 mins for our food, we were now really, really impatient. I had already checked about 4 times for our food. As I was bored I checked through the receipt again, and noticed that we had only been charged 500kz per burger. “Hang on a sec, that doesn’t make sense!”

I went back to the counter and checked out the menu again. We had “Burger no Pao” printed on our receipt. What the f#ck?? Burger NO roll!! How the hell do you have a burger with no roll?? Haha. Quality. Only in Luanda I guess. Or maybe it is a Porra thing. Anyway, it took about 10 minutes to explain the issue, and eventually I got it sorted. Our food however had still not arrived. Ten minutes later it, the burgers arrived. Sonder “Pao”!! Man, this was a joke. It took me another 10 minutes to of waiting at the counter to get our rolls. Man, what a joke. I won’t be back here on a Sunday!! Carnage!

We got back to Shoprite, to find the Cambio open again. Obviously the chick had gone for lunch. I was seriously miffed, as had we had more cash, we could have gone elsewhere for lunch. Bummed! Well,the burger did the trick anyway, and we did a big shop and bought a tub of ice cream, at R79 a small tub. It’s just wrong!

Chilled that eve and got to bed fairly early. In preparation for another long week, still trying to fix the DHCP issue.

Bummed.

Click.

Nunnsby

Easy Going Guy 😉

Loving Life