Malawi part two

The rest of the Malawi visit was fairly uneventful after the excitement of visiting the coffee farmers. We managed to get a lot of work done with the programme team and came away feeling really positive. 

For our 'down time' my colleague and I spent most of our time looking for nice places to eat and visit - not an easy task in a city that's hard to get around. Lilongwe is divided into areas, with big spaces in between (often planted with maize which makes you feel as if you are driving from village to village rather than through a city) and the taxis are expensive. In addition, there is very little up to date web information about places to go. 

We did manage to find a couple of nice local places - including an Italian restaurant and a little garden cafe. We spent the whole afternoon at the Italian on Sunday; we arrived for a late lunch and realised they were closing at 2:30 (we arrived around 2:15) but they kindly stayed open long enough for us to eat. Not only that, they allowed us to stay in their garden and use the wifi until they re-opened at 5:30... so we decided to stay for dinner. And we had dessert! I was pretty excited about that. I couldn't think why at first as I am not much of a puddings kinda gal, but I realised it is very un-West African to eat dessert and I can't remember the last time I went for dinner and finished the meal with a sweet. We both had tiramisu - not the best in the world but nice enough, and I was able to polish off the lot! 

The little garden cafe was expensive but nice. They were clearly catering to western tastes and had lots of fresh salads, juices, nice coffee, and interesting things like falafel. 

On the way back home I was allocated a different layover hotel in Addis Ababa, which I was pleased about. It still didn't give me an authentic taste of Ethiopian food, but I did have a nice bolognese, and the spiciest salad known to man. It looks innocent but had slivers of extremely hot pepper running all the way through. 

The room was nice, and had a lovely view over a misty Addis in the morning.

And as this blog seems to be mostly about food, I will finish by saying it was nice to get home and cook for myself - including satisfying a long held craving for a cheese sandwich. 

Spicy groundnut stew with boiled plantain and beans