Choppies Dinner

On Saturday all the Penn interns went to dinner at the house of the owner of Choppies. Choppies is a chain of discount grocery stores in Botswana and South Africa. The owner is really good friends with the director of the UPenn-Botswana Partnership and his son is going to be a freshman at Penn (Wharton) next year. So he invited all the interns over for a dinner at his BEAUTIFUL house in Mokolodi, which is a village outside of Gaborone with beautiful large houses and a game park.
To get to the house Zein (the director of BUP) drove us in his pickup truck. Obviously there wasn’t room for all of us to sit in the cab of the truck, so some of us rode in the bed of the truck. I felt kind of rebellious doing that, since my dad’s had pickup trucks all my life and I’ve never been allowed to. Though totally illegal in the states, I have to say it was the most amazing way to drive out of the city. It wasn’t too cold that night and we were sitting back and when we got to the pitch black road outside of Gabs I saw the most amazing stars I’ve ever seen. There were so many and you could even see part of the Milky Way – it felt like being in a planetarium.
When we got there we met the whole family and saw they’re beautiful house. The owner of Choppies is Indian. There’s actually a pretty sizable Indian population here and it reminded me of Aashna. They fed us SO much food! First we had little appetizers, then they started to bring out TRAYS of meat like chicken, sausages, pork, and lamb, from the Braai, which is a South African style bbq. I thought that was the meal so I ate a lot. However, after I was already stuffed we learned that this was just the warm-up for the actual dinner, which was amazing Indian food. I ate so much I could barely move.
We told the owner’s son all about Penn and gave him all the ins and outs on what to do and not to do as a freshman. We also watched the US/England game. Though it got off to a rough start (we almost cried when England scored in the first 3 MINUTES) we were satisfied that we at least tied.
It was a great night!