Starbucks a la Sierra Leone...

Or, Breakfast on the Road:
This is a photo of my go-to breakfast spot in Bo. Finding places to eat in Sierra Leone is always a challenge, and in the provinces it's only more difficult. My experience in Bo was a bit of a Goldilocks effort. The first day we drove around town and stopped at over three places looking for tea and bread, the local breakfast staples. Finally, we ended up at a mid-market 'restaurant' which served machine bread (a white bread akin to a giant hot dog bun in appearance, texture, and taste) with mayonnaise, ketchup, a boiled egg, and spaghetti noodles. The whole concept of a noodle-ketchup-and-mayonnaise sandwich was more satisying than the food itself. The tea is reliably, a half teaspoon of cocoa mix laden with a quarter cup of sweetened condensed milk and mixed with hot water. The next day we found this place. A bit more downscale and just right. For about 75 cents you get tea and Fullah bread with mayonnaise and egg. I'll have to do a bread post to introduce the various kinds available in Sierra Leone, but fullah is my second favorite, and the most widely available. It has a chewy but thin crust and soft, airy interior. Not nearly so heavy as J-wan bread and not as bland as machine bread. It took all of one hungry morning to get used to the idea of havng a mayonnaise laden loaf for breakfast. As an infrequent bread eater and someone who has never bought mayonnaise in my life, I never thought it could taste so good, especially in the morning, but I am a convert. When in Rome, and hungry...eat as the Romans do. Plus, the egg and mayonnaise, inferior ingredients as they may be, carry me through to the unreliable second meal, sourced sometime between three and six o'clock. The final Goldilocks moment was breaking ranks and telling them how to prepare my tea: No de put borku milk na me yone, yehri? Ok, ihdo. And put tealeaf, yah? With one third the sweet milk and a tea bag added, it almost tasted like something with caffeine in it.
Now that I'm back in Freetown I miss the ritual hunt for a place with thermoses lined up and mismatched plastic mugs dotting a wooden plank table. I even bought a jar of mayonnaise. But it just doesn't taste the same.