Tuesday May 25, 2010- Zanzibar day 2

I woke up t 7 am ready to start the day fully rested for the first time in a while. I was planning on getting up an hour before to go run on the beach with some of the boys but decided thy 60 minutes was of better use to me in bed. Now I feel like a human being again. I did all of my unpacking and headed to the common area for breakfast. I already
had heard that the chai (tea) they served us for breakfast was amazing. The breakfast served every morning is a type of fried bread cut into triangles and tea. The bread tastes just like an old fashioned donut, only breadier. It's very good, but once asinine teres no sort of protein and fruits or vegetables in our diet so the energy level a couple hours after breakfast is pretty nonexistent.

Once we were done with breakfast, we waited to hear when we'd do our next mock teaching. Lily told us we'd be doing it after lunch and until then we'd be helping the hotel staff with some labor. We had a choice of machete-ing the grass, gardening, or painting. Aliviana and I jumped at the painting project immediately, followed by Kristie, Estella, Clara, and Yao. We worked along with the hotel workers who loved to talk to us and about us in Swahili because we hardly understand it. The phrase to say,"what's up?" or " how's it going?" is "Mambo!" or "Mambo vipi?" to which we are to reply, "poa" or "cool". But there are about 50 different Swahili greetings though so they like to switch it up to confuse us.

We painted 4 houses or bungalows with a red dirt/water based paint. A couple hours later we were splattered and exhausted and headed to lunch. We had some time to kill so for the first time, we all went down to swim in the ocean. The sand s as white as snow here and the water is a color I've never seen in real life. It is the lightest turquoise and when stepping into it you can see your feet crystal clear. The minute I stepped into it's path I felt the warmest consistency of sand and sea that I have ever felt. It felt like bathwater, only salt based. I ran all the way in and dunked my head only to look at the surrounding area in complete awe of where I am.

We all talked about our weekend plans and how we wanted to snorkle and see things around the island. After a while of lounging we heade up for lunch, which was my first experience is ugali. Ugali is a cornstarch and water based thing that kind of looks like a mix between rice and mashed potatoes. It was served with some kind of meat in a watery gravy sauce. The reactions of the Americans to the ugali is quite mixed. It's fairly tasteless as it is basically just a filler food but it doesn't taste bad. A lot of peope have resorted to not eating lunch or dinner when ugali is around but my philosophy is that when I am given food, which isn't that often, I will eat it.

We ate and got ready for our training session. Ours was the first presentation and went fairly well. We ended up teaching or watching others teach for about 4 hours. Once we were done with that, we had a couple hours of free time before dinner so we went back to the bungalows and me, David, an Marnee chatted and tried to get the energy up to go see the soccer game that was taking place down on the beach. We managed to catch a couple minutes of the game before sundown and all I could think was," Tony would totally love playing out here." it's incredibly beautiful.

We came up and the Mosquitos were out in full force. I feel like it doesn't matter how much bug spray you put on, they'll still bite you. These little effers were attacking my legs like no other. Getting up my first day I already had 20 bites. I went inside until dinner and then headed for the common area where everyone was hoping for rice and beans instead of ugali. Everyone was pleasently surprised at dinner to have rice and beans, but there were hardly enough beans to feed all of us. When I looked around, I didn't see Aliviana. I asked around and found out she was still napping in her room. After a few half attempt of people saying someone should go get her, it rained. I decided Id go get her and then I could enjoy the rain for a while. She was grateful that I came to get her and when we came back they had brought fish for her to eat.

It had been a long day so when I came back to my room I could hardly write in my journal so I hit the hay fairly quickly after a quick shower.