Reading this Week:

• Women as Demons by Tanith Lee
• Africa: Another Side of the Coin by Andrew Sardanis

After IST, I departed down to Livingstone for a debatably earned vacation with my girlfriend. Livingstone is, of course, famous as the location of Victoria Falls (perhaps vice-versa), but the first thing I dragged us to was the museums.

Livingstone, of course, features the Livingstone Museum. My neck of the woods features the Moto Moto Museum, which is billed by at least one guidebook as the second best museum in Zambia. It is second only to the Livingstone Museum. At the Livingstone Museum a lot of similar subjects were covered, like the history and pre-history of Zambia. It is unfortunate for Zambians and PCVs that a lot of the actual artifacts relating to the pre-history of Zambia are ensonsced in the British Museum, apparently, but what I bet you the British Museum doesn’t have is a sweet-ass double-handled hoe:

The most amazing part of the museum was the small room dedicated to ole’ David Livingstone. It had a variety of original artifacts, such as his cloak and his writing box. It also featured his original letters that you could look at. So that was really cool to see the things connected to a guy that had such an impact on the future of the African continent, for better or for worse.

The museum also featured this sweet ride:

All in all, if you’re in Livingstone I can’t recommend the Livingstone Museum enough. It’s close to everything, by the sheer nature of Livingstone, and if you’re a Zambian resident it is well worth the like K15 it took to get in there. Lots of background on Zambia as a nation if you haven’t seen that stuff before, and I think it is the only place you are going to see a lot of relics of the pre- and early colonial eras.