Eu não falo portugues

A more chilled day of lining up meetings and working in my hotel room. I needed to avoid cabin fever and as Maputo is the kind of capital that's easily explored on foot, I had a wander. These colourful decrepit benches looking out across the Indian Ocean caught my eye. On the slopes that lead down to the sea, there are mounds of trash. I remember Maputo ten years ago being bad for garbage disposal with lots of overflowing skips and derelict sites doubling as dumping grounds. Much of the central area has had a facelift, but the decrepitude is not hidden too far from view.

In big supermarkets in Africa you usually have to get your fruit and veg weighed and ticketed before getting to the checkout, usually by a rotund woman in a green t-shirt and hairnet with an extremely nonchalant attitude towards customers. I presented some loose apples for weighing, without a plastic bag, which was wildly against policy and caused extreme consternation (consternação).

People often say that Portuguese in Portugal sounds like Russian or an Eastern European language, and they're right. Here the accent is easier to decipher, but still hard. When I don't know a Portuguese word, which is pretty much any time I need a word, I say it in a nasal form of Spanish, replacing end-of-word 'o' sounds with more of a 'u' sound, as pronunciation dictates. If people are in forgiving moods, they humour me and nod a bemused form of acknowledgement.

I think I eventually charmed the apple weighing lady with my feeble attempts: 'nao quer plastico'. She seemed to understand I was one of those types with too much time on his hands, making life harder for myself and her by shunning plastic. More consternação at the checkout, with the guy not believing that I hadn't stuck in some more apples to my loose pile after the weighing, and consulting with nonchalant fruit lady on how the system could have malfunctioned so badly. I'd like to think my actions have contributed to one less plastic bag on the slopes leading down to the Indian Ocean, and provided some plastic awareness to the staff in SPAR.