We are two electrical engineering students doing our Master's Thesis as a Minor Field Study on small-scale hydro systems in rural Mozambique. This blog is about the adventures we encounter during our ten weeks abroad, but also about the preparation, all good advice we've got and what might just have been time spent sleepless worring about completely unnecessary things.

Monday, 5 March 2012

Quick facts

Here are some quick facts on Mozambique for you to get acquainted with the place:

Capital: Maputo in the south near the South African border
Population: 23.5 million
Area: 801590 sq km (about twice the size of Sweden. or twice the size of California if you so wish)
Coastal line: 2470 km (which is pretty much the lenght of the country!)
Official language: Portuguese
Exports: shrimps (among other things)
Neighbouring countries: South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania
Percentage of the population below 14 years of age: 45%
HIV/AIDS adult prevalence rate: 11.5%

There you go.

A few words in Portuguese:

Thank you - obrigado
Toilett - casa de banho
Welcome - bemvindo

My learning progress is awfully slow, only speeded up by the fact that i use facebook in Portuguese. Problem is, this results in me learning some not very useful phrases like

a carregar - loading 
ver tradução - see translation


On the other hand I know the weekdays pretty well by now. There is just one thing disturbing me with the names. They are based on the fact that the week starts with Sunday. After Sunday comes the second day; segunda-feira, after that the third day; terça-feira and it goes on like that. For someone coming from Sweden, this doesn't make sense at all. A Swedish week starts with Monday, no other day and day five could not possibly be Thursday. I see potential confusion when making future appointments.

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