Bairro novo

New neighbourhood. I'm living on Avenida Patrice Lumumba, named after the assassinated first Prime Minister of the independent Congo. World leaders of varying degrees of notoriety are found commonly on Maputo street names. The new apartment I moved into this morning is a few buildings away from Avenida Vladimir Lenine, and we've got roads in honour of Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung, Kim Il Sung, and others I've yet to discover.

I unpacked to start to feel at home when I finally got back to the new apartment. Before that I'd been locked in the office, squirrelled in a musty downstairs basement for Skype calls. No one realised I was still there so it caused a flurry of excitement among the security guards when I showed up cocooned behind the metal grill.

The new apartment had a power cut around bedtime, which I hope isn't a sign of an unreliable supply. I tried to press my face up against the window to see if other apartments had been affected, but largely just looked like a strange new neighbour licking a pane of glass.