Today, Tuesday July 8th, is our last day in Mafikeng.  Tomorrow we will journey back to Johannesburg to finish out the week and our final days on the project.  We have a Thank You dinner planned for this evening at a restaurant, so last night was our final night eating at the hotel. In clearing out my hotel bill, I saw that I had eaten dinner 14 times at their restaurant out of a total of 23 nights spent at the hotel. We are pretty familiar with the place and they are pretty familiar with us.  Surprisingly, however, there were still items on the menu I hadn’t ordered yet and for my final night, I went with the team’s overwhelming recommendation to have the Ox Tail.  It’s not something I would pick normally, but my teammates had been raving about it for 3 weeks, so I had to give it a shot.  They were right — it was more like beef stew, albeit with bones — and it was absolutely wonderful and served in a cute pot!

Final dinner at the hotel – Ox Tail – complete with my red camping cup that got a lot of use

And while our time at the Mmabatho Palms has been interesting to say the least, it did leave us with a wonderful sight on our final departure to the University.  It was the coldest day we’ve had so far with a low of 28F/-2C and so the trees out front of the hotel that are sprayed by the fountains had frozen and formed icicles.

Icicles – A sight I never thought I’d see in Africa.

And peeking out was a rainbow — such a nice sight as we pulled out.

#IBMCSC