Tired after two nights of dancing and a full day in the sunshine, I was looking forward to curling up with my book in bed and getting a decent night’s sleep. My body has been extremely cooperative with new foods and evening adventures since I’ve been here, but I could feel a hint of a cold coming on and I didn’t want to push it. Brooke had to work all weekend and was in need a relaxing evening, but it was a Saturday night after all, so when she suggested we walk over to NICE and grab a glass of wine, we both agreed that was the perfect way to end the day.
The Namibian Institute of Culinary Education (NICE) is just around the corner from Puccini House. NICE is a chef finishing school linked to a profit-generating restaurant. The idea is that the restaurant will eventual fund the school, eventually making the whole project self-sustainable. With the tourism boom in Namibia, the demand for management and hospitality professionals far exceeds the supply, due largely to a lack of training facilities. (This is the case for many professions, particularly doctors and nurses, but that’s a different blog entry…) The idea is that NICE will provide world-class training for the future restaurant and hospitality management professionals of Namibia. Neat, right? And just around the corner.
So a glass of wine turned in to splitting a bottle, but at N$120 ($15 USD) for a really good bottle of cabernet, we might as well. We know we’re not supposed to walk at night by ourselves, but it’s so darn close, it seems totally absurd to call a cab. We joked on the way home that a bottle of wine at a nice restaurant costs the equivalent of the round-trip cab ride from a private taxi (which costs seven times more than the public taxis and severely complicates my danger / cheapskate calculations).
We’ll definitely go back to NICE and next time will order some food with our wine. It’s supposed to have the best sushi in the city. Who’d have thought I’d been eating sushi here?!
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