Photographs and Ticket Stubs

Well Zoe and I finally made it to Mwanza and what a trip it was!

We stayed at my favorite hostel in Arusha, Ujamaa Hostel, for the night and watched a good amount of Friends episodes with the other hostel guests. I swear, I will never get sick of that show. The great thing about Ujamaa is that it’s set up like a house so that all the guests at the hostel interact like a family. We sleep on bunkbeds in one of the two rooms, we share a bathroom, we eat breakfast and dinner together around the dining room table each morning and evening, and we veg on the couch like one big, happy, Western-sitcoms-missing family. Ujamaa even has three dogs that we can play with in the yard (Jamie, they’re big now!). Love it.

Anyway, as much as we love Ujamaa, Zoe and I said our goodbyes on Wednesday and hopped an Akamba bus to Nairobi. We managed to cross the border quite easily, only being jipped by the ridiculous exchange rate when paying for our transit visas. FYI, at NO point in my time here in Africa has 20 USD been equivalent to 33,000 Tsh. No way. Oh well.

Nairobi brought our first taste of how much reverse culture shock we’ll have to deal with when we go home. It was full of multi-level buildings, flashing lights, and billboards in English! We waited for our connection bus in a waiting room that was playing competing English TV channels across the room and occasionally announcing bus departure times in a mix of English and strange-sounding Swahili. Out on the street, lights flashed and good hip-hop music rang out from pimped out daladalas and second-story nightclubs. The hecklers approached us as usual, but would ACTUALLY LEAVE US ALONE when we said a simple “No thanks.” WHAT?!?! I could hardly deal with it all.

Then, we got on our bus and drove through the night back Southwest to the Kenya-Tanzania border. We stopped at gas stations where we could pay for a toilet (at least these were still not westernized) and where we could get frisked by a policeman or woman before getting back onto the bus (A wakeup call to Kenya’s security issues, I guess).

We had no trouble at all when crossing back into Tanzania. Our residence permits let us in for free (insert a sigh of relief here, since the fee for re-entering Tanzania with out that would have been 100 USD). The drive through Tanzania (it’s daytime now) was hot as anything and quite long, but we finally made it to Mwanza. Except here’s where our trouble started. We got dropped off NOT where we thought and proceeded to get lost for about an hour with all our stuff on our backs… but then we made it and now we’re staying at the Christmas Tree Hotel and exploring the city.

My time is about out, so I have to go now. More updates later. I’ll be home in a week! How crazy is that?