Yup, at last, we have said our goodbye’s to Dodge Central and moved into the hotel and are settling in. I would have blogged last night to let you know about the adventures of yesterday, but the electrician came to do some final adjustments to our mains box with his trusty screwdriver in the socket trick, and managed to blow the power supply to our modem. Of course he managed to do this at about 5pm on a saturday afternoon, when all the places that supply anything that may have helped get us back online, were closed.
So here I sit on my new comfy kingsize bed, internet and power on, with the aircon on a pleasant 22 degrees, overlooking the busy streets of Garki (pronounced Gu-ri-ki) through the open curtains.
Yesterday was a really busy day. A good day. We all left Dodge C and came through to HH (the hotel), where the power was on. The guys had still not connected the new generator cable, so we were unsure as to whether we would be able to move in or not. Mic and I stayed in the suite while G and BLB ran around getting the cable sorted out. Once that was done, we headed out to Dunes to do some shopping for the chef, so that all our meals can now be prepared at the hotel. And then we went for pizza at our favourite little restaurant.
After lunch and a little more shopping we came back to HH. The decision was made, we would be moving in. Yay! G had to go back to Dodge C to pack up and bring all our stuff from there to the hotel. He also had to go buy diesel for the generator, and go to Park ‘n Shop (classy name eh?) to buy a water cooler machine. While G was out, BLB, Mic and I decided to open every room on the first floor and steal whatever we could to make our new home as comfortable as possible. We looted a new armchair for BLB, a new un-scuffed coffee table for the lounge and a side table for my coffee cup both *with* glass tops, and some prettier bedside lamps for our bedroom. It was a successful looting session.
We spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning, scrubbing, polishing, making beds with the new crisp linen I had bought from Woolies. BLB was changing plugs, fixing the outlet on my pretty bath, and, once we had realised the modem was bust, he spent a large portion of time searching for another transformer with the same voltage to make it work. We got the place looking pretty shiney and homey, but were unsuccessful with the modem. Made a quick phone call to G who was still out on the road to tell him the bad news, and he rushed off to whichever shops he could find still open to try find a matching transformer. He came home with some dodgy chinese emergency light with a *similar* voltage transformer, but it did not power up the modem. Bummer. In fact that same transformer has not even powered up the emergency light it was made for after almost 24 hours of charging.
Both G and BLB were contemplating moving back to Dodge C for the weekend, because god forbid we have to survive a whole Sunday without internet. I think I may have growled at them. They quietly decided to battle through the torture of internetlessness.
Instead, we decided to have a movie night. This was not as easy as it sounds. The DSTV decoders are not yet active at the hotel, but thanks to my lovely sister, Zoo, we have a whole bunch of movies on our hard drives. So now the boys had to find cables to connect the laptop to the big screen TV. Big mission. Once they found the correct cable which was packed in a suitcase G brought over here years ago, BLB struggled to find the correct port. He was convinced the TV’s in the bedrooms were different to the one in the lounge. Meaning the ones in the bedrooms had the correct port, but the one we wanted to watch from in the lounge did not. After moving the heavy TV from our bedroom to the lounge, G pointed out that in fact the TV’s were identical, and BLB just could not see the ports because the bracket was in the way. So next they had to take the one TV back to the bedroom and take the lounge TV off the bracket to plug it in. Done. We now had picture. Picture, but no sound. Fuck. Next was the search for the audio cable. Amazingly, they eventually found an audio cable. Yay! BLB being as pedantic as he is, had screwed the TV back onto the bracket after connecting the first cable, and now had to take it off again to connect the audio cable. G nearly put his back out trying to pull the TV off the bracket, not realising what BLB had done.
The setting it up was way more entertaining than the movie itself! 
The second movie the boys chose was not really my thing, so i decided it was a good time to climb into my new bed. When I got in, I struggled to get comfortable and could not undertsand why I kept rolling into the middle. Brand new bed, surely it should have no bulges in the bed? I managed to find an almost comfortable diagonal position watched a program on my laptop and thought maybe once G got into bed it would level it out a bit. Hmmm, no such luck. G climbs into bed and we both smack into each other in the middle of the bed. He didnt say a word about the awkward angle. Not wanting to complain, I clutched onto the side of the bed and held myself away from the centre. I looked over to G and saw him clutching his side. We burst into fits of giggles. This was never going to work. So by now it was around 2am and we stripped the bed trying to figure out what exactly was wrong. We then found that the guys who had put the bed up, had not set up the centre supports. Genius! Luckily, a few days before we had found these support thingies lying in the suite, and not knowing what they were, but thinking they *must* be important, put them in the kitchen. So there we were at 2 something in the morning re-assembling this bed. While G was screwing the parts together, I noticed the mattress protector was not a mattress protector, and in fact a duvet cover. Clever people here decided to put this huge mattress inside the duvet cover. So we had to re-make the bed *and* re-make the bed. Was really funny.
Never seen a bed base like this.
Anyway, we eventually got to sleep at around 3am. And that was our first night in our new home.
Today, G and BLB managed to find 2 desks in an office downstairs and stole them for our suite. They spent the afternoon cleaning them up and setting up G’s PC. All in all, our suite is looking like home now, almost everything up and working correctly.
That’s all for now! What do you guys think?
Love to all,
M xxx