Travel!

Yeah yeah, it's been a long time, my bad. My computer broke, but that's not really an excuse as it happened like a week ago.

So lets see, what's happened? I've done a lot of traveling, a lot of vacationing on beaches, and even a little productive work for Peace Corps.

First up, Thanksgiving. Since I have a really nice house for Peace Corps standards (aka running water, electricity, and a fireplace), I had a little gathering of volunteers to eat, drink, and be merry together for Thanksgiving. We felt positively American eating macaroni and cheese and pie (albeit mango not apple). We felt positively Tanzanian when we bought a couple chickens, brought them home still alive on public transportation, killed 'em, and ate 'em. The killing process involved hanging them by their feet to a tree and cutting their heads off with a kitchen knife. I think I screamed throughout the ordeal more than the chickens. Though chickens squawk, not scream. Just saying. Anyway, by the time it was done I was covered in chicken blood and knew I was finally a man. 

While we're on the subject of chickens, I'll mention that I spent a significant part of both Christmas day and Boxing day chasing around a rouge chicken named Freddy given to us as a gift. Chickens would make excellent capture the flag players - they are so quick on their feet. I truly enjoyed eating that chicken. 

What next? I went to Peace Corps In-Service-Training, a two week conference for volunteers after they've spent a few weeks by themselves at their site. Everyone brings a "counterpart," a Tanzanian from the community (or school in the case of Education volunteers) that is interested in being involved in any projects you do. We had sessions ranging from ways to put on AIDS awareness events to how to start a permagarden to the impact of corporal punishment in schools. It was great to see everyone and hear stories about how they are settling in at their sites. (Well, almost everyone - of the original 47 volunteers in our class, we're down to 41. Six went home, either for medical reasons or because, well, they wanted to go home.)

By the time the training was done, school was out so I was on vacation! I went up to Moshi, a touristy and fancy town in northern Tanzania, and stayed with a friend who has views of Mt. Kilimanjaro from her house. We were only there for a couple days, but we did get to walk up to the gate of the park and sneak in for a couple minutes. To actually spend a day in the park is expensive, $60 aka over a week of pay, so we didn't really go into the park. I'm sure I'll be back though! 

Next, to Tanga, a beach town on the northern coast of Tanzania. It was HOT, but we got to swim in a pool and the ocean, and eat hamburgers for a dollar, so all was well. We stayed in an old German colonial era mansion converted into a hostel. It didn't have running water, but I got a giant room on the corner of the second floor with giant windows with a view of the water all for three bucks. What a deal!

After Tanga, we got on a plane (yes, you read the right, I flew on a plane!) to Pemba, the northern most island in the Spice Islands archipelago (which, for those interested for some reason, also included Zanzibar and Mafia Islands). There's a scuba resort there that gives a great (like, really great) deal to Peace Corps volunteers, so a bunch of us took advantage of it and got our scuba license. It was crazy awesome. The water was super blue and clear and beautiful and the coral reefs were incredible. We dived down to around 60 feet and saw some awesome fish and stuff. Its hard to describe, its just a whole different world down there. I highly recommend it. So come visit me and I'll show you some awesome scuba diving, for cheap!

Let's see, next up, Christmas. After heading back from Pemba to my house I went back to Tukuyu, my closest town, for Christmas. My closest Peace Corps neighbor, Hannah, lives there in another nice house and she had a gathering for Christmas. Just like Thanksgiving, we cooked a bunch of food and killed a chicken. Stupid Freddy. And we got a Christmas tree! Tukuyu is cold enough that it has quite a few evergreen trees so we went out in the afternoon of Christmas Eve with a saw looking for a tree to cut down. As we walked down a street we happened to see a kid up in a tree cutting down, you guessed it, Christmas trees. Christmas trees don't seem too popular here, but apparently somebody wanted some. We asked the kid to cut us one, and boom, we had a tree. Easy peasy. 

After Christmas, of course, is New Years. I spent New Years on Matema Beach on Lake Malawi. I've been there once before, but this time a couple other guys and I decided to hike in from the mountains northeast of the lake instead of just taking a bus in. It was a really cool trip. We spent the first day hiking through Ruaha National Park. It was really beautiful but we ended up basically just walking along a road the whole time, so it was more like being bad at hitchhiking and less like really hiking. The second day was  much more interesting. We started off hiking through a these little tiny villages (or rather groups of five or six houses near each other) way up in the mountains. We were up at around 10,000 feet so it was fairly cold. Around every corner we'd get groups of kids on the side of the road staring at us - you got the idea they didn't get a lot of international visitors. Then finally, we got off the road. We finally stopped climbing up and headed down towards the lake. Even when we were way up in the mountains we could see the lake in the distance. To get there, we walked on a tiny trail through the rain for about six hours. It was really muddy and steep and its a minor miracle we all made it down without any major injuries. We were all exhausted by the end of it for sure. Though I shouldn't complain - our sixteen year old guide we hired promptly turned around and headed back up the mountain when he'd delivered us to the lake. It was quite a day - starting shivering in the wet and cold way up in the mountains and ending getting sunburnt swimming in 80 degree water. 

And there we go. You are caught up in the life-o'-Willie. Hongera sana. Look it up.