Hiking (and academics) in Hong Kong: Mambo from Tanzania

"Your ticket isn't for today. It's for tomorrow." Most definitely not the phrase to hear while standing at the ticket counter in the Nairobi airport after two red-eye flights and the next flight, that I planned to catch, leaving in an hour. I almost cried. How could that possibly be? I've talked to six administrative people about my booking across three continents and two days and none of them noticed that small detail or thought to tell me? No way. "Yes, look here." The woman at the ticket counter turns her computer screen towards me and points out that I am booked for a flight out of Nairobi on June 15. Now I may have changed a few too many time zones in the past few days to be reliably aware of the date, but isn't today the 15th? She scrunches her eyebrows and turns back to the screen. Oh. She prints a ticket, hands it over to me, and turns to the next customer. Now why couldn't the first person who I talked to way back in JFK have done that? I still don't know what the issue with my booking was and honestly, I don't care.

A public pee-station. Handy but boy do they stink.

Back up to that middle day between our two red-eye flights. Between our flight out of JFK and our flight to Nairobi, we had an 8 hour layover in Amsterdam. Best layover location. Out of the four of us traveling to Tanzania this summer, Emily, a '14 (rising senior) from Toronto, was the only one who had been to Amsterdam before. Our two other traveling companions are James, a '14 from New York who traveled to Tanzania two summers ago, and Tucker, a fellow '16 from Massachusetts. Ok, introductions over, back to Amsterdam. It's a wicked cool city. We left the airport and wandered down narrow streets lined with five story buildings and street-lined canals busy with tour and house boats in a slightly sleep-deprived haze. We made the necessary tour through the redlight district which was, shall we say, entertaining. Coffeeshops and pedestrians alike emitted the sweet smell of weed which permeated the air. We didn't enter a coffeeshop but there sure were plenty to choose from (if you don't get what the big deal is about coffeeshops, don't worry about it. Just stop by one when you're in Amsterdam.)

James, Tucker, Emily, Rachel in Amsterdam

And now we're in Dar, a sprawling, dirty, web of streets and buildings. It's quite a different city from Amsterdam. First of all, the amount of skin that we see on the streets has dramatically decreased from the red light district in Amsterdam to the partly Muslim city of Dar. Yesterday, I ran downstairs in our hostel to get help to turn our shower off (big struggle), realized halfway down that I was still wearing my PJ shorts which only come down to mid-thigh, and ran back up to throw on longer bottoms. (In case you're wondering, a nice man came up and got our shower off. And for anyone who's thinking it, we even avoided wasting water by putting a bucket under the shower head and using the water later to flush our toilet. That was my original intent, to fill up the bucket for flushing water so I suppose I succeeded.) I guess wearing shorts that don't cover my knee would be fine in a hostel where there are lots of foreign guests, but it's not something I'd like to get in the habit of. Most women here wear brightly patterned skirts or dresses down to their ankles though I've seen a few wearing pants and even a few wearing skirts just down to their knee. But there are similarities between Amsterdam and Dar. Narrow roads and bikes. A dangerous combination. Especially here in Dar with motorbikes zipping around and drivers who just expect you to move out of your way. So far we've met their expectations.

Outdoor market by our hostel in Dar

We spend Saturday and Sunday wandering around Dar, catching up on our briquetting and stove research (Oh yeah, our main reason for being in Tanzania.) and generally orienting ourselves in the city. Tomorrow we begin our crash course in Swahili, a language that will be good to know as few to zero people will speak English in the villages we'll be visiting. Also good to learn for straight up politeness. Most Tanzanians in Dar understand English to some extent but it feels so rude to continue to speak in English and mime out what I'm trying to say. Hello (jambo or habari) and thanks (asante) really don't cut it when I want to say, "Instead of chicken I'd like the falafel, please."