butterflies, hot toes, & technicians

My alarm went off far too early this morning. As I stepped out onto the street I was greeted with a bom dia of the guard and warm sunshine. Then a peculiar thing happened – a monarch butterfly flew in front of me and fluttered in circles - all the way to the office! (It is a good four or five blocks with many turns.) The butterfly intrigued me. It was almost as if it was leading me somewhere or wanted me to see something. When I arrived to the office, it flew away. Hmm. It did give me a few moments to enjoy the morning and not stress on the events of the day. A nice little distraction.

My afternoon walk back from lunch and a Portuguese lesson had my toes burning! The warm sunshine turned into some kind of laser beam. :-) The ten minutes to the office were so hot that the metal zipper on my bag hurt to touch.

Technicians kept coming to my house today. Three different ones. All were saying the same thing in Portuguese over and over and over. My Internet has been out at the house for over a week – so I’ve been trying to get it fixed. This is no small task in Quelimane when you are not fluent in Portuguese nor have all day every day to sit at home and wait for the technicians to arrive. Yesterday the excuse was he couldn’t find a bicycle taxi to take him into town. Interesting. My house is on the same block as the phone company. Today was a success though! After two visits, a technician brought his friend and they fixed it. The Internet has been working fine until we had a massive storm and everyone’s connection went out – and came back three days later. Mine never returned. When the techs saw my computer they would shake their heads and mumble something disgruntle and kept repeating to me “windows vista!” “windows vista!” and I kept replying no. (I have a macbook.) They tried to take my computer and push a bunch of buttons – which obviously didn’t work. Oh but it must be my computer that is broken and not their connection! If only I could communicate better. :-) They kept speaking louder and louder and pacing in my living room – but eventually google popped up on their “windows vista” and all was right with the world again. I even got a new ethernet cable out of the deal.