Who needs the hamptons....

When you have Gisenyi, a Rwandan resort town on the northern part of Lake Kivu-a 5 minute walk from Congo. (alas, i had hoped to hike the volcano located about 10 miles north of Goma this weekend but safety concerns took precedence over my desire to see a lava lake)

So instead of scrambling up the side of a volcano, i enjoyed scrambled eggs at a heavenily $16 breakfast buffet at the fancy resort in Gisenyi. Worth every penny.

Other highlights of the weekend included:

Hiking 7 kilometers (with a steady entourage of 2-16 year olds in tow) to the next village to "bathe in the hot springs" which given the 80 year old rwandan man who "guards" the springs, the fact that they are no more than 4 feet across at most, and that locals come to boil potatoes (its takes 30 minutes) there, we decided to forgo the bath and stick a toe in instead.

Dined at the hotel Paradis, located on a beautifully lush peninsula with all the other muzungus in town. And I can attest to the freshness of the food. As we were walking in, alana exclaimed, "Oh my. Is that a goat on the back of that bike?" to which i replied, "you know, it appears to be." We then witness the live goat, strapped to the bike being carted directly into the hotel kitchen. Hmm...needless to say, I opted against the goat brochettes for a nice summer salad instead.

This is not a highlight by any means, but an interesting piece of advice: "Do not allow Congolese men to "buy" you drinks...After our long trek to the hot springs we decided to engage in a little happy hour activity at tam tam, the local beach bar. So as we starred at the beautiful horizon, watched two local men in what appeared to be Haynes underwear roll around in the sand like a chris issak video (have i mentioned that male affection, i.e. hand holding, hugging, strattling each other on the sand is commonplace behavior?), and listening to more venga boy music, the waitress came up to us and informed us that the group of (congolese) men behind us wanted to buy our drinks. Since we had just ordered and well, are students, we agreed and when the drinks came we gave them a little nod in appreciation. However, this of course resulted in two of them coming over to talk to us--which was pretty harmless as its always nice to practice french. But it got old after about 40 seconds and luckily we were saved my by "host uncle" and his friend who met us there (the uncle lives in Goma just over the border) to give me a DVD for my host mom (in what i am praying is not more soft core porn--awkward!) anyway, basically what happened is we got up to go and a waiter came running over to say that we hadn't paid....and when we explained that our nice congolese friends were going to pay the ($3) tab, he said they hadn't so we were forced to fork over our own $3...which obviously doesn't matter but what a shadey little trick to talk to muzungos...

Let's see, what else? did i mention the breakfast buffet? it had every fresh juice under the sun, including avocado-which unfortunately i didn't try because i was too full to move after my 4 trips to the pastry table....

Immediately after ingesting the largest amount of food that is humanly possible we wandered over to the beach were we witness an oddly placed step-areobics class in the middle of a park. I did not participate, but since i have never seen any areobic classes in this country (unless you count the forced "stair master" exercises of walking up the 234234 hills in kigali) it is interesting to see that the "rocking horse" has made it to rwanda.

Gisenyi in a nutshell: relaxing, glutenous and beautiful