Day out on the town.

I forgot to mention though about yesterday as we were leaving the game park there was a really neat shop called tribal textiles, where we went and there were tons of people painting on textiles by hand.  Here is a picture of a guy working they made these into pillow cases and sheets and table clothes and things like that.

Today was a quiet day we didn't really travel anywhere.  Chris has malaria, which is no fun, he was feeling shivers and then feverish intermittently.  So we left him at home in the morning and Josh and I headed out into Petauke to hang out with the locals and check out the market place and get some lunch.

Josh and I headed out into town, we went geocaching and we didn't find the one geocache that is in town, it was placed in an area where there was a lot of pedestrians so it was probably missing.  Anyway we got a lot of looks on the side of the road looking around a tree.  Then we went into the market and struck up a few conversations with people there, they are very friendly and almost everyone there really wanted to talk to us if they could lots of questions what is your name what denomination are you?  which is funny, and of course they know what Lutherans are.  We grabbed some food there in the market, some french fries and fried doughnut things and we grabbed some sugar cane and ate that.  The 10 foot long stalk of sugar cane cost 16 cents. 

 It is tricky a native showed us how to eat it, you have to peal off the outer area with your teeth and eat the sweet pulp in the middle.  We bought a few gifts in the market and probably spent 3 or 4 hours out there it was fun and interesting. Here is a picture of a charcoal vendor who we talked to for a long time about our kids and he wanted to know what America was like.  He couldn't believe that we don't eat nshima in America (the white maize porridge that is very common here) it just blew his mind that it didn't exist, and that we only eat bread.  Here is a picture of him anyways.  Mr. Zulu is his name.

His sons are next to him, Mr. Zulu is the guy standing by Josh.

Well we made it back to the Plugers house, and just kind of spent the rest of the day hanging out at the house Christ started to feel better by the evening and we hope that he has maybe started coming around I don't know we'll see by tomorrow.  We spent the rest of the evening playing board games and having fun. 

Tomorrow we head off to a Pastor's conference in Chipata about 2 hours away.  We were really lucky that we were here during this conference, apparently it only happens every other year that ALL the missionaries from both Zambia and Malawi and all the national pastor get together, so it will be great to be there for that.  I hope Chris feels good enough to take us, one the missionaries might give us a ride if Chris can't do it, so it seems either way we are going to the pastor's conference, and we are going to be spending 1 night there so there will be no blog tomorrow. But hopefully in my next blog I'll have good pictures of the big soccer game between the Malawi pastors and the Zambia pastors, Pastor Enoch was getting excited about the big competiton.  Josh and I think it would fun if we could bring this competition into the states.  Alright take care everyone.  And to comment on Mom's post it was neat to go the service, both experiences were really amazing, so having a good trip so far.  -Peter