The customer is always right

The most common moan here in Luanda is regarding customer service. Or rather lack of. Whilst it is true that a country crippled by a brutal civil war under a decade ago cannot be compared to the bright lights of the US, it is not rare for both expats and locals to find themselves laughing or crying at the level of service here.

Take a recent trip to a bar on the Ihla, a beautiful strip of land by the beach with several restaurants and bars. My friend, an admittedly rather pushy and demanding latino type ordered a salami pizza. I am no Carlo Carlucci but I know what a pizza looks like and therefore assumed that the gooey mess that arrived was actually a bowl of cheese sauce. My friend then began to dissect her dish, spooning her way through the slop to find her beloved salami.

Me, a typical Brit, I probably would have pushed the dish aside, smiled meekly at the waiter, said it was fine and ordered a take away later. My friend, on the other hand called the waiter immediately. She began to list the defects of the dish- its viscosity, its overwhelming proportion of cheese and above all the lack of salami. The waiter, nervous and understanding neither her technical language nor her strong Spanish accent, took the dish to his colleague, who passed the dish on to his colleague and so forth. Soon a large circle of staff developed, rapidly handing the dish along as if passing buckets of water to extinguish a great fire.

Eventually the manager came over, asking us what the nature of our ‘situation’ was. My friend affirmed, remarkably politely and calmly as one would not expect of a fiery latino girl that there was no ‘situation’ but that she ordered a salami pizza, and in turn expected it to contain salami. The manager, now acting as mediator in what had rapidly adopted near judicial proportions, then turned to our waiter. The waiter, pointing to exhibit A, the disputed pizza which had now completed a full round of pass the parcel and was now back with him, confirmed that my friend ordered a salami pizza and he had presented her with one. The coup de grace then came, however, with him adding ‘…oh yes, but the chef ran out of salami and so substituted it for mushrooms and sweetcorn’. It was in his words ‘a salami pizza… just without the salami’. Without so much as a giggle, grimace or the faintest recognition of the irony of our ‘situation’, the manager looked to the sky, perhaps in desperation, perhaps in disbelief. I, on the other hand, spurted with laughter, trying desperately not to spill my cocktail, before checking it was indeed a cocktail and had not also been swapped for something else.

I know my friend’s experience is not a phenomenon confined to expats. Going for dinner with Angolan friends, I noted that they, no doubt through several comparable experiences to my friend’s, had resorted to very strong language with the waiters after four incorrect desserts had been presented to one single diner on our table.

The service might be a tad comical at times, but in general the food is of the highest quality here. The freshness of the gambas and lobsters here would make even Michael Winner’s mouth water. And hey, in any case, who cares? I don’t like salami.

Just friends

‘I don’t have real friends. Never have done… But it’s fine, I know loads of people here’. The sad but honest admission from B, a Portuguese expat living in Angola. Perhaps his admission was but an exaggeration after a ‘particularly awful day’ or perhaps it was one total honesty fuelled by the whiskeys and beers he was downing to drown out these sorrows. On the face of it, this guy was a perfectly fun, happy and interesting person to chat with. If it were not for my red raw mosquito bites, I would have chatted longer. Nevertheless, underneath his seeming indifference to true friendship, I recognized an unwelcome void that I have sensed in plenty of expat partygoers.

Expats are in Luanda to make money or for a challenge, but rarely do they find themselves choosing to settle here for ties of friendship. 'B', as I will call him, is no doubt not the only businessman in Luanda who finds ‘trust’ a bitter pill to swallow, both in terms of business as well as friendship.

My first piece of advice from an expat oil worker on the plane arriving into Angola was as follows: ‘Trust no-one. If someone comes to your house, check who sent them. When served at a bar, make sure nothing extra is going into your drink that shouldn’t be… Watch your back’. Armed with this sense of suspicion I was hardly in the mood to make friends. Add this skepticism to those doing business in an extremely competitive environment and I understand B’s situation. Nevertheless, and apologies for sounding corny, but friendship and love are the essentials here- even over water and electricity.

Another business man I met explained how he did not like to socialize with the other guys from work, not only because he was keen to avoid talking shop too much, but also because he felt out of place as someone who missed his wife more than beer. This man was lucky in so much that his beautiful and overwhelming friendly wife was in town to be with him every month.

Whilst a peek into Angola’s bars and nightclubs might give the opposite impression, deep down, the majority of expats out here on their own are not happy- either craving for friends and families if they exist back home, or supplementing friendship for work, sex or drink. Indeed work, sex or drinking for many expats is like a tranquilizer, numbing the effects of home sickness or loneliness. Soon this tranquilizer, often coupled with an overriding sense of distrust takes over and makes one immune to true friendship.

With my other half chained to his office computer seemingly 24 hours a day, I have found it hard to get on in Luanda. I was also, perhaps unduly, reticent to engage with expat males who might mistake me for their next tranquilizer. In spite of this I cannot stress the amount of comfort I get in knowing that I have true friends and a loving family back home, genuinely good people that I can trust here and above all, my other half who hopefully also loves me just as much, if not more than his beer.