Eating and Bathing

What we eat:

Pizza. Seriously. Well, when we lived with a host family, we ate traditional South African food - pap (also called porridge, which is a staple here in South Africa is basically thick, odorless, tasteless cornmeal), rice, chicken, pumpkin, etc. However, we now have our own place and have recently discovered the joys of homemade pizza. Long gone are the days of delivery. We have to buy the cheese and sauce in our shopping town over the weekend, b/c our site unfortunately doesn't sell mozzarella. We do buy the flour, oil, veggies, etc. here and enjoy pizza night at least twice a week. We've also starting eating significant amounts of home-made pancakes, and we may bake cookies or brownies later today. Yeah, we're not really losing weight anymore.

How we bathe:

We fill up our basin with cold water from our one sink. We bathe in our kitchen area, which means we don't have to move the basin once it's filled with water. We then heat up two pots of water on our hot plate to warm up the basin water. That's pretty much it. We make the person who is not bathing hide out in the bedroom partition, b/c the process is ridiculously awkward and not contemplated by "in sickness and in health." When the process is done we both -- the basin is quite heavy when filled -- carry the water outside and dump in our yard.

The purpose of bathing:

It's not to per se achieve a state of "cleanliness" but, rather, to avoid the always approaching state of stinkiness. Through bathing we strive to attain the equivalent of 5 o'clock shadow at home -- in other words, if you shower at home you're not perfectly clean at the end of the day. Your end of the day feeling is what we're shooting for.