Escaping the Jungle

This crazy jungle known as Kampala can chew you up and spit you out if you're not careful. I started to lose my cool yesterday in the market. It's threatening and exhausting to be constantly berated.

WHITE MAN = MONEY = SWARM HIM LIKE BEES TO HONEY

As I alluded to in my previous post, the soccer game refocused my team and set the stage for a good week so far. BUT, sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes you just need to escape from everything and everyone and do your own thing. This blog is more then just a summary on the progression and successes of Light of the Lord Global Missions. It's an honest, all encompassing look at my adventure.

So, what do I do when I need an escape? My close family and friends know it's just two things:

1) FOOD - hole-in-the-wall, down home, popular to the locals, non-chain, delicious food 

2) PHYSICAL FITNESS - no, not a treadmill or some worthless machines. I mean Fight Club, kick my butt, torture me type fitness. Make me cry, or bleed, or throw up. That's fitness. 

Both are therapeutic, both help me relax, but most importantly, both make me very happy : ) 

So, let's escape from work today....

CrossFit Uganda, Anyone?

Meet Moses. Moses is the trainer at the little gym in my apartment complex. He is a country music singer, wears a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and taught himself how to play the guitar. His favorite musician is Dolly Parton (American country music is very popular over here). He writes all his own music. In true country music fashion, he wrote a song about how his girlfriend ran off with a Muzungu (white man) in Europe while she was working on her Masters. How awesome is Moses? He is the kind of person you like within 5 minutes of shaking his hand. 

Moses noticed me working out the first couple days I was here and said, "I like that you train your body without machines." That's all he had to say, it was a match made in Heaven! Since that day I've taken Moses under my wings and started showing him some CrossFit stuff. 

In the above picture, I am teaching Moses the first fundamental movement of CrossFit - the air squat. For his first workout, I put him through Tabata Squats - 20 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest, for 8 rounds.  He made it to round 6 and quit. It was quite amusing, but he was a great sport. 

So now the daily routine works something like this: I come home and work out (escape), Moses draws pictures of everything I do, and then I teach him another lesson on CrossFit. Hey, spreading a fitness revolution can be a mission in itself. 

Food, You Complete Me

To my future wife - you have to love food as much as you love me, or we're not going to last too long. I guess you can blame it on my Italian genes or being spoiled with the best Italian cooking all my life. I have to admit, I'm pretty darn good at sniffing out good food joints in any town, but I cheated in order to find the best coffee in Kampala. 

With the help of Lonely Planet, they guided me to Cafe Pap on Parliament Ave. Thanks to my parents obsession, I've become quite the coffee snob. I have to go with Lonely Planet and say that this is the best coffee in town. The house coffee comes directly from the slopes of Mt. Elgon. Being right across the street from the Parliament building (Uganda's Capital Hill), the restaurant also attracts some seriously connected clientele. It's pretty cool stuffing my face while mingling with the movers and shakers of Uganda. 

How do you escape and unwind? Am I total nut-job or what? I hope this post was able to give you a more holistic view of my crazy experience here in Uganda! 

Ha, attempting to teach Moses the Front Squat but looking more like a Press

1000 Cups Coffee House, a close 2nd behind Cafe Pap