Stanzania - Arriving in Dar

The day has finally arrived and Christine has made it safely to Tanzania!! (After a day and a half of looooong plane rides, she was happy to finally be able to stand up) I went to go pick her up at the Nyerere International Airport in Dar, where I hadn't been since my night-time arrival just over a year ago now. It seemed a lot smaller and less imposing to me this time around, but I was still getting flash backs to how crazy and overwhelming everything seemed that day and how I'm sure it also was for her. When she came through the doors, I saw she had made a friend on the flight, Jenna (see above) who realized on the plane that her connecting flight to another city in Tanzania was in fact not for 2:30pm today, but tomorrow, and basically had nowhere to go in Dar for a day. So we all went back to the hotel which had plenty of rooms and then hit the town.

Dar is so big, even I still don't know my way around it all that well, but I took Christine and Jenna to all the places a Peace Corps Volunteer would be expected to take his or her guests: the Holiday Inn Hotel, Subway, the Casino, the place where you can get pizza, the place where you can get real ice cream....sorry guys but this is what a Tanzanian vacation feels like to me after a year of being so far from all these things. We went up to the rooftop patio at the Holiday Inn, which had a really nice view of the city and the ocean nearby (see picture). Eventually we made our way to the water and got some fresh fruit along the way, and I finally was able to prove how big the avocados are here. They also got their crash course in Swahili essentials training: pipi = candy, lala fofofo = sleep like a log, the "banana" in "asante sana, squash banana" from Lion King acutally means "to squash together"... just the important stuff.

Later on, we met up with some other random PC Volunteers who are in town. It turns out another guy I know has family coming in for the same time and may even be in the same Safari National Park when we are, so we may run into them again next week. Then it was back to hotel room, which has good enough internet for real Skype, so we talked to Mom and Dad back home. I was happy to have stolen one of them to add on my end of the line this time.

I can't wait for the amazing two weeks that lie ahead. We are going on the ferry to Zanzibar Island tomorrow morning and will stay there for 2-3 days. I will hopefully learn alot more about the (early) history of Zanzibar and have plenty to share because it is a really interesting place. Things we may do include: a spice tour of all the natural rare spices that are found on the island, seeing and possibly snorkling with 250-year old tortoises, walking through forest trails packed with an uncommon species of monkeys, and maybe even just enjoying the beautiful white sand beaches all around the coast. I'll be trying to keep a running update of things as long as the good internet will be available, so keep checking back for the latest news!