- People here in Zimbabwe are very competitive when it comes to saying “Hello, how are you?” They take this very seriously. I am now learning to take the initiative to say this first instead of waiting others to greet me.
- Electricity is barely there. So apparently they used to have a pretty clear schedule of when people of certain region would have power and when they don’t, but nowadays you need to forget that a schedule even existed. Usually at my place we would have power around midnight to dawn… which is barely useful, but yeah…
- Purple is the colour of Bulawayo. Now we are entering the second week of October and Jacaranda starts to bloom everywhere in town. You could see some streets and avenues would just be covered in purple alleys in two weeks time and I am pretty excited about that!
- Tap water is drinkable! Well, for those who are brave enough and around those buildings where they have water filters. But yes, I have been carrying my bottle around (bought it here at one of the Chinese shops, will talk about it later) and refill my water almost everywhere I go.
- They have Chinese shops here in Zim. Well, not exactly like shops owned by Chinese people, they are shops that sell Chinese imported goods. So these shops are famous for having all sort of trinkets and selling cheaper goods.
- But, there are barely any Asian here. So far I barely see fellow Asian around the town, it could be just me lacking more adventurous trips around, but I could safely say I met only 3 fellow Chinese (ethnically) people here. One time I was walking home and the guy in the car even stopped the vehicle just to stare at me which was quite funny.
- The people here have money, but not exactly. So we are using exclusively domestically used currency called Bonds. You can safely say that the exchange rate would be 10 Bonds per 1 USD or so, it changes every single day so it’s really hard to say. But these Bonds notes you can only get here in Zim, while usage of USD is pretty much illegal unless you have special permits to do so. So yeah, it’s pretty complicated right now.
So yeah, those are 7 things I found amusing from my 7 weeks being here in Zimbabwe so far.
Cheers!