mac and cheese.

Africa is a little different.

Seasons are backwards. They drive on the wrong side of the road, and of the car for that matter. The toliets flush weird--not backwards, but weird. Everyone has housekeepers. Yes, even us. The orange juice has apple in it, and the apple juice isn't quite like ours. Nutella is in glass jars. You don't go out after dark. Period. They eat chutney. You prepay for internet megabytes like minutes on those WalMart cell phones. Traffic lights are "robots" and barbeques are "bries" and bros are "brus" and going out is "jollying" and french fries are "chips," but regular chips are chips too. They have more plant diversity in one peninsula than in all of Europe. The power sockets are weird, and so are the washing machines. There's no heating in houses. The wealth/poverty discrepancy is tied with Brazil for the highest in the world. Race isn't something people are afraid to talk about, and they own their history here. Everyone rallies around national heroes. Everyone. The sun shines harder here.

Africa is a little different. So when we get little tastes of home, we're beyond overjoyed.

All the students from Boston College are under the direction of Ms. Ida Cooper. She has maybe 40ish international students, mostly from BC and California and Emory. Ida is our South African granny. She's short and old and cute and gives me kisses and holds my hands when we talk and calls me her darling.
Ida cooked for us the other night. She had all her darlings over to her house, where she set up tables on her back patio and put out sodas and fruit juices and South African wine. She made a little fire and a lot of food. Do I know what it all was? No. But I ate it. And it was warm and probably unhealthy and smelled like love.
As people finished eating, everyone edged into her tiny living room to avoid the cold that was rolling down from Table Mountain. Someone picked up a guitar, and we sang. People from America and South Africa and Zimbabwe and people that grew up with English and Xhosa and Afrikaans all hunched together between couches and coffee tables to belt Free Fallin and Lose Yourself and the White Stripes and John Mayer and our own made up song about Ida herself. 
And it felt a little like home.


Here in our little apartment, we get 3 whole channels. Siri, Colleen, and I come home every night and bundle up in sweats and socks and fumble around our kitchen for left overs. We watch the news at 7 and hope to God that whatever comes on at 7:30 is in English. And last night it was. Not only was it in English, but it was set in Boston, our very own Boston. I'd never been so happy to see Drew Berrymore and Jimmy Fallon and Red Sox Nation. We found a pizza delivery place and spent the evening recognizing the Charles and Fenway and the Pru and loving every second of it.
It was a little like home.

It's like mac and cheese for the soul over here, those little pieces of familiarity. Be it the joy of finding your brand of peanut butter in the grocery store or seeing a girl in an Auburn University T-shirt, those little things give us a warmth inside that reminds us that while we're literally on the other side of the world, those things we love are ever present, ever waiting for us to come back home and share the stories of our adventures.
So send us emails, write us letters, leave us comments and know that you're essentially giving us a little mac and cheese to keep us going in this place that is, well, a little different.