Uganda Style

TL;DR: working at Colin's as usual, big night out at Mountains, Forest and Ecstasy.


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Power cuts rule this place. Particularly when it rains, and it rains really heavily near Fort Portal. It also happens to be the beginning of rainy season, weyyy! Our workspace is sick, out in Colin's backyard full of scrap metal littered on the grass, with a steel cross section as a workbench and a vice clamped to it. Very DIY. From under the tarpaulin, we can observe as the skies darken menacingly before collapsing with the roar of thunder, always around early afternoon. From that point, we have about 15 minutes to clear out before it gets too heavy for even the tarpaulin. Then we scram inside to join Team Alan, who are lying on the couch crunching on Excel (and not excelling). Classic windy babes. We collapse there too, although we sometimes go and visit Team Stove who are messing about in their bamboo hut inhaling fumes and watching water boil all day. Classic stove. Colin phases between the different teams, imparting random knowledge in between his rants, and just generally being an awesome professor. Classic Colin. When the rain clears, we'll go back outside and start again, bossing through the fabrication process of our longtail outboard motor prototype. Classic longtail.

Today however, the power was off, the generator wasn't working and Colin had a massive argument with a mechanic who though he could fix it... So we continued working on making the bearings which luckily didn't need any electricity (just sawing and planing), until it came to drilling. At that point, working a hand drill wasn't very exciting, or easy...

When the power came back on later, we got to use the chop saw and angle grinder to create some of the pieces of cross section that would be used for the casing. Some really cool and hands-on work to do, for us theoretical engineers from Warwick!

In the evening, all 9 of us headed to the most uptown place, Mountains of the Moon hotel. They were serving a mean buffet. It's hard to explain how wonderful it was not to have to wait excessive amounts of time for food, for once. On the other hand, tonight is the night the infamous Iceing began. Kris initiated it by handing an ice-cold Smirnoff Ice to Ali at dinner, and everything went downhill from there. The night progressed to Forest Club, followed by Club Ecstasy, with all of Colin's clique including Judith and Mary, plus Daniel and Radie King. The club was packed but we still ended up dancing there for a long time. Highlights of the night included:
- Ali and me teaming up to thrash some locals at pool in Forest.
- The large-scale assault of Ices, which almost killed me and Shree. We were simply too full from the buffet to deal with the cold.
- Creating a huge ring at Ecstasy to dance in, which soon included many locals joining in.
- Ali falling asleep standing up in Ecstasy. Then waking up and continuing to breakdance as if nothing.
- Finally seeing the famous Seedy Alan at Forest.
- Judith perving on Ali ("do you want to have kids?") and Shree ("I really really like you!").

Classic Fort night.