some traditions remain unbroken!

carlos, christine, tifas & mask

as it was easter sunday yesterday christine and I had organised an easter brunch which we then decided could also be a bit of a bbq and housewarming party. so we invited a few people, asked them to bring friends and family, pets, drinks and stuff for the grill.


we got up fairly early and started preparing the pasta and potato salads, got the cheese and salami ready and hardboiled the eggs for the traditional 'eier tütschen' (swiss easter-thing whereby everyone chooses and egg, then you knock it on top of the opponent's egg and the egg that doesn't break wins - easy). I have yet to spend easter without the egg-thing; some habits die hard! I even tried to colour them in with food colourants; but pink on brown shells does not seem to work! oh well - they were nice anyways.

the buffet

we had told people to come from 12pm onwards and as usual, nobody wants to be the first one to turn up... so by about quarter past one we decided we were starving and so we started to eat; it took about 5 minutes for people to turn up; and how nice to be greeted by someone chewing their food!


in the end about 20 people turned up and as a true collective group effort we eventually managed to get the bbq burning (with a little help from plastic bags and kerosene... ;-)) once it was going though it was great. nicky had made some truly delicious burgers and we had bought meat to make brochettes - they were really nice! so on we went through the afternoon, chatting away, drinking beer and wine, eating and just generally enjoying ourselves despite the appalling weather (it started raining at around 10pm the previous night and did not really stop until everyone had left our 'garden party' at around 6pm) - proper english rain... mmh - I'd hoped to have left those grey and desolate days behind for good... but then again, it is rainy season!

at 7pm we all went to the serena hotel to the opening night of the rwanda film festival, the kigali part. it's the 4th year this is running and they take an inflatable screen into the hills - hence the name 'hillywood' - and show films to communities, followed by discussions - a really cool idea! this week there will be films shown in different locations in kigali. the films come from young rwandan film makers but also international film makers - but it's all very independent (except for films like 'shakes hands with the devil' which is being shown for obvious reasons) and small scale; but still very exciting. towards 11pm my heels were killing me and we were tired after a long day of lots of excitement, so we walked home - me barefoot with my ban-ki moon shoes in hand...