My room mate's clothes blew off the balcony

This is very amusing to watch her. She keeps saying, "how does this happen!?!" I explained to her that when you don't attach your clothes to the string, they can blow away. Oh the joys of privileged white girls washing clothes by hand. We have some fun.

I just did a load of laundry myself. It's interesting...all these small things we barely think about at home have to be the center of our attention here. Planning when and how to do laundry is a complicated task. First, is the water working? That saves you half the time and you can use more water. I won't bore you with the rest of the details, but it's an interesting experience instead of just throwing it in the machine.

Today was an epic day. We left at about 9:30 and went on a tour of the city of Dar. It was nice to get off of campus for a bit of exploring. It's funny that after less than a week, the campus is starting to become familiar. I can't even begin to describe how much we saw today. We didn't get back until 9:30 pm. We saw a collection of nice hotels that we can visit for a bit of home/first world comfort. I bought a tanzanian soccer jersey at a little shop near there. There are wonderful pools and brunch on Sundays! I might have to give into that once in a while. Then we went to a few other shopping areas. None of us are really buying anything since we're spending so much time here. It's hard to explain that to people so instead you just say, "Kesho" which means, "tomorrow". This is sort of the polite way to say, "absolutely not". It's pretty funny.

Next we basically walked all over the city. We say lots of mosques and churches and saw different parts of town that have a variety of cultural and religious historical backgrounds. We went to a fish market where I saw fish I didn't even know existed, like lobsters that are blue and white. Crazy! We had lots of delicious food today and ended with dinner at a good indian restaurant. Everywhere we went there were fruit stands and we tried all kinds of fruit. My favorite one was a custard apple. deeelish! They're all funky looking but yummy on the inside. Seeing how these people live their day to day lives was just fascinating. Some of these fishermen have so much strength and it's incredible that they don't have more injuries. It was also a day that we saw very different class systems. It's pretty incredible to see the vast gap of wealth. We passed by massive hotels and giant embassy houses, then we were amongst fishermen who barely make enough to live.

I'm in the process of uploading all of my pictures to a picasa album. I will post them as soon as they're done!

<3