Weekend events

This past weekend was pretty interesting- on Saturday we went to see the Kasugi Tombs, which is this big palace made of concrete and spear grass- I'll post a picture of it later. But for now, imagine a straw hut, only x10. It’s a very large and dramatic structure, and apparently after the rainy season, they change the spear grass roof- all of it. Must be a huge task.

Some of the more interesting facts about the place:

One of the kings had something like 90 odd wives, and had 112 odd offspring from these wives- talk about prolific. Only 5 wives could be “official” wives at any one point, but the rest of the wives lived behind a fence… all 85 or so of them. The kings also had multiple palaces (3) that were located around Kampala, and when a king was alive, a big bonfire would be lit outside the palace grounds. When the kings died, they were to be buried in their own palace, and the fire would move inside the grounds, and the wives of the king would have to maintain the palace. The firstborn son of the king had to take care of the wives and the family (poor guy!) while the second borne and onwards had a chance of being king. There is still a current king, and he lives in a little house on Jinja road, apparently.

After that, I went for a run with Aliza, which was pretty decent- only thing is I don’t really run to exercise, whereas Aliza does (at least she goes to the gym regularly, and what else I don’t know) so in the end I was sore, and she wasn’t.

Sunday was great- I slept in till 11, which probably added up to a 13 hour night or something along those lines, which is somewhat strange in that I don’t stay up here in Uganda that often, but the work must have just got me tired. After wasting half the day, I went for another run with Aliza, and we decided to run a bit further than normal… and got promptly lost and ended up running around in circles for about 40 minutes, till we met a nice guy named James who walked us to the main road, and we finally got back home after a full hour. Needless to say, I was sore again after the run. At least I finish the run…

Today was the first day of the Malaria Symposium, which was pretty awesome in terms of getting a crash course in all the important issues going on with malaria and specifically malaria in Uganda- I got all the background information and the research history that I wouldn’t have gotten without sitting down explicitly and asking every single question myself (which I probably wouldn’t have done, for fear of seeming ridiculous). Shereen and Aliza seemed to be especially entertained by my “schmoozing” which basically consisted of me walking around and “looking important” and striking up random conversations with people… though I do have to admit that I did get to know a fricking lot of people, and even had some people I didn’t know at all come up and say hi to me… All in all, it was really good to get a lot of issues addressed and questions answered (especially the questions that I wouldn’t have been smart enough to come up with on my own) and I’m glad the symposium happened. There were a few low points to the symposium, mainly presentations that didn’t really present new information and were just brochures read aloud, but the quality overall was quite high. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.