Of Cars and Food and Hunger

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What has brought me back to this erstwhile neglected blog? A series of random thoughts which were too long for a Facebook status update.

They say you shouldn't shop when you're hungry, because you will inevitably buy crap and unhealthy food. One of my resolutions is not to eat in my car, because doing so means that I am hungry and can't wait to sit down at a table and eat. I only break it when I am really hungry. But the reason I created this rule for myself was because of two incidents that happened when I was weak from hunger and ended up eating in my car:

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Number one happened one Saturday afternoon after some activity that I cannot recall. I had a hundred and one things to do and by 3pm, I still had not eaten. I grabbed a pie from the supermarket and rushed to my car. I was late for my next appointment, but I was famished. The pie was on the passenger seat, calling my name. I pulled out of the shopping centre and into the main road. And because there was quite a bit of traffic, decided to take advantage and eat as quickly as I could in the car. I was so hungry, I ate that pie in about three large bites. This was between Arcades Shopping Centre and Manda Hill Mall. If you have been to Lusaka, you will know that this is a very short distance of a couple of hundred metres. By the time I reached the Manda Hill traffic lights, the pie was consumed. Satisfied, I looked around to notice two guys in the lane next to mine who had been neck and neck with me and my car the whole way from Arcades and had witnessed my triple-bite face-stuffing. To make sure I knew that they knew what I had just done, they both leaned over, shook their heads and mouthed, "No way!” 

Tjo! It was bad. It was, "earth, open up and swallow me whole now” type of embarrassing.

The second happened a few months ago. I was parked in front of a shopping centre waiting to meet a friend. I had bought a couple of shawarmas and a drink. I received a text message, "delayed". It was almost 5pm and I had not eaten anything since mid morning. I decided to quickly eat my shawarma, again, in the car.

Half way through eating (this time I took slightly smaller bites, although still large), I noticed a guy standing directly in front of me and looking straight at me. From where I was parked, I guessed he was Congolese (DRC) because of the bleached skin (dunno why our friends up north love unnatural yellow skin). Anyhoo, Mr Congo in an extremely tight muscle shirt, proceeded to saunter toward my car. What followed was the worst pick up line I have ever heard in my life (as in, spoken to me directly). 

“I like the way you eat”, he said. After ten minutes of his pleading for my name and number so that we could become friends, my appointment finally arrived and rescued me from Mr Congo Muscles. It turns out he was from DRC and was hoping to stay longer if he made some good friends. *eyes roll*. With the queues at the US Embassy and scores of others trying ti make it to South Africa, we forget that a Zambian green card (because an NRC actually is green - lol), is still making it for some people.

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So what is the moral of the story? As you can see from the pictures, there is no elegant way to eat when you are hungry. There just isn't. And that is why in Africa, it is considered very rude to disturb someone while they are eating, and even more so to photograph them.

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