Keeping Healthy in Khartoum

Greek Pasta Salad - delicious

Having arrived here in our first storey Khartoum flat during the early hours of Saturday morning, all good intentions of healthy eating and excersise were set aside for now. The stopover in Addis Ababa which you can read about here, took a heavy toll on my healthy eating plan. The salads and vegetables served in the hotel, albeit delicious, [the salads]were drenched in high-oil dressings and the vegetables were cooked with lashings of butter. There were also hot bread rolls to die for and I had more than my share of these. However, I did manage to take two oranges to my room which I ate later while watching Amharic television!


By Monday I had settled into life here in Khartoum, so no more excuses. I had been to the supermarket with my husband and bought all the necessary staples and salad vegetables to make healthy meal options for myself. Pasta is very cheap, salad vegetables like cucumber, tomatoes, onions, sweet peppers and lettuce are readily available at stalls on the banks of the Nile river. (I hope to do a post on this exciting excursion soon.) I made a deliciously crisp, tasty and low-calorie Greek Pasta Salad for lunch. It looked so fresh and tempting that my husband brought a plate and dished a portion for his lunch! I have posted the recipe below. It is delicious.

The flight of steps leading up from our flat

On Tuesday I had relocated my gym clothes which I'd left in the spare room before flying out to South Africa in September last year. At 6h30, while it was still dark, I was up, dressed and ready for my home-made excersises in lieu of my regular spinning classes back home. I run up and down four flights of steps inside our flat (forty steps); I do this five times. Then I go up onto the roof and do six laps of jogging around the top. I have to do this in the dark as it is not good for a woman to be seen in a tank top and cycling shorts out in the open. I use a hand-held torch.

Standing on the landing, I photograped the flight up to the roof and back down to the flat

I 'd like to treble my step routine in the next two months and do three times as many laps on the rooftop by then as well. I also have the skipping rope which my dear friend, Ida from South Africa blesssed me with last time I came up. I'll take it up to the roof tomorrow morning and do some skipping! I know that to real hardcore fitness fanatics this may not seem difficult. Yet for me who has been spinning for the past three years, it is quite a challenge to suddenly be pounding the surfaces by running up and down stairs and jogging on the roof.

Halfway up the flight of stairs to the door leading out onto the roof

Up on the roof - above and below

Herewith the pasta salad recipe.

Greek Pasta Salad (Weigh-Less Pasta Recipes)

Serves 1

100g Pasta, cooked weight

22.5g Olives

22,5ml Low Oil Dressing

30g Reduced Fat Feta Cheese
100g Cherry Tomatoes

50g Cucumber

25g Lettuce

25g Onion

Assemble the salad, drizzle the dressing over and serve.