Subjunctive

In the last year the smaller branch of SPAR several blocks away has had a refit to be more like a whole foods store. Shopping there requires close scrutiny of the prices as many things that are imported come with ludicrous costs for the consumer. As it has all the ingredients to do so, I’d like Mozambique to develop its dried fruit sector as I don’t want to start paying over ten dollars for a bag of dried apricots. I’m quite partial to them with some natural yogurt, which is affordable if you keep your eye on which brand goes into the basket.

Ilídio came over for a Portuguese lesson, fresh from his second coronavirus vaccine dose. He named a vaccine manufacturer that I hadn’t heard of, which I think on further research was Sinopharm. This is China led and is being taken up by various countries around the world. Ilídio has done well to get both doses as Mozambique has only double vaccinated about 650,000 people to date, which is 2% of the population.

After vaccine chat we resumed our usual dissection of intricate (some may say overly pedantic for my level of Portuguese) grammar. Ilídio had a bee in his bonnet about people who spell estejamos (the first person plural form of the verb estar - to be - in the subjunctive) as estejemos, which apparently is a common error. Given that I’m struggling to apply the subjunctive in conversation, I can’t guarantee I’m not going to fall into the estejemos trap.

Maputo has such interesting blocks. I don’t know what style this would be called but it’s certainly interesting to walk past, carting a limited bag of affordable items home from SPAR.

The other major update of the day was the handing over of the bag I carried over for my friend, complete with dildos. These have been sitting with me for a few weeks as my friend sadly travelled to Beira in central Mozambique, where her dad recently died from Covid.