I arrived in Lilongwe, Malawi on June 29th at about 12:30 pm. Brittni was waiting for me at the airport, but my luggage wasn't. I wasn't too upset about losing my luggage because I figured it would turn up the next day. A friend of Brittni's from Peace Corps, named Jackie (who I will probably reference a lot in this blog because we traveled together), had a friend, Christine, who arrived on the same day as me. So we shared a cab together to our hostel, Mufasa. My first impressions of Malawi, from the cab window, were that it was very brown and not very developed. You hardly see any buildings while driving on the main road from the airport. What you do see are lots of goats, people (most without shoes), and garbage.
We arrived at our hostel and decided to go get food. Brittni and Jackie wanted us to try some traditional Malawian food so we went to a restaurant called Afrika's, where we ordered nsima and masamba. Nsima is basically a dough ball made from corn flour. It's quite flavorless and not something I really enjoyed (and believe me, I tried it plenty of times. I had it for almost every meal.) Masamba are cooked greens. These I didn't like either. To me they had a very bitter and sour taste. But Brittni and Jackie love them so I guess maybe it's an acquired taste. Regardless, our first meal frightened me a little bit. I was worried I wouldn't like any of the food in Malawi. But I hadn't yet tried the samosas or the mandazi, two things that I loved.
Lilongwe is a strange city. It's the capital of Malawi but not the most populated city. Blantyre is bigger than Lilongwe. Lilongwe is very spread out. One thing I noticed right away is that there are no sidewalks. Pedestrians have to walk in the street (and dodge cars) or in the ditch or dirt on the side of the road. Walking in Lilongwe can be treacherous. After lunch we visited the Lilongwe market. The market had stall after stall of clothing, toiletries, shoes, DVDs, chitenjes (the fabric that all the women wear), etc etc etc. We walked through winding streets and alleys of market stalls looking for clothing for the 4th of July. Finally Brittni settled on some sequined red and blue shirts.
Finding some patriotic clothes
Market stalls
