Dennis, my Luganda professor, gave me a Luganda name one day at lunch, "Mirembe," or "Peace," which is the same name as one of our cows. Unsatisfied, I asked by rural homestay father to give me a Bagwe name. He pondered for a day and then told me he would name me "Angela." And then, randomly in the grocery store yesterday, the guy who was mopping the floor shouted "Nawa Kula!" at me. "It's a name," his coworker explained. "He is naming you."

the taxi system is quite genius here. You can get anywhere you need to go, and if you need walk further to get to your destination, you can just hop on the back of someone's bicycle. Each taxi is a Toyota microbus with a driver and conductor; the conductor hangs out the window shouting "Kalerwe Kyebando Kanyanya Mpererwe!" etc and picks passengers off the side of the road. Anywhere from fifteen to twenty people cram into the seats, and you are supposed to pay before you get off (the most unlucky get the fold-up seats at the end of the row which tip over at every turn). To get off you yell "masaawo!," which will cause everyone in the taxi to crack up if you are a muzungu. There are technically "stages" which are the designated stops, but really anyplace along the route you can yell at the conductor to get off or picked up.

in downtown Kampala there are various stages where taxis stop to fill up, and there are usually men walking up and down the stage directing people into the right taxis. Additionally, there are two huge taxi parks, Old and New, which were described to me by Zack as "a beach, only with taxis instead of sand." There are market vendors surrounding the lot and boys selling g-nuts and men who ask where you're going, seize you by the hand, and shove you into the appropriate taxi. It's a pretty well-run system, overall. Boston could do to take a leaf from Kampala.

I'm 90% sure I'm going to Gulu in the north for my ISP to study farming, or, "The Post-Conflict Restoration of Agriculture Through Local Procurement of Food Aid." Until a couple of years ago Gulu was a hot spot for the Lord's Resistance Army, which has since moved into DRC, and receives a ton of food aid that has created a cycle of dependency EXCEPT for an initiative to buy the food locally instead of importing it through the US and EU's agricultural surplus. It is, in a nutshell, everything I am interested in academically, and (crossing fingers) I'll be in Gulu for a month before coming back to Kampala for a few weeks. There are 5 or 6 other students headed up there so we're hoping we can all rent a house. I'm really excited because I actually have direction unlike for my China ISP, though I'm sure other aspects of it will fail to measure up to last semester.

today I had brunch at City Oil. In Uganda, the nicest restaurants are at gas stations. It had air conditioning and I was even cold! But I maintain that no place outside of New York State knows what a bagel is. They should be boiled! The ideal bagel is crusty on the outside and doughy and moist on the inside, and shouldn't even require cream cheese.