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ummm this is where we wash our dishes every day after eating.. BLEH (April 25, 2011)
judith.
22.
adventure/travel/wildlife/conservation/voluntourism.
location unknown.
currently blogging about travel to hong kong & india.
B.S. university of illinois.
original blog based on kenya&tanzania spring 2011.
22.
adventure/travel/wildlife/conservation/voluntourism.
location unknown.
currently blogging about travel to hong kong & india.
B.S. university of illinois.
original blog based on kenya&tanzania spring 2011.
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PHOTO CONTEST. →
Please vote for my lion photo :]
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two-headed blanket monster :) best franddsss taking a break from directed research! (April 25, 2011)
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crazy family Easter dinner - guess which family members we all are! :) (April 24, 2011)
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TRAVEL TRAVEL
I finally got confirmation that I can change my flights so now I can TRAVEL after the program :) A group of students have been planning a trip for awhile now and I never considered going because I knew how bad I missed home, but now that there is only 2 weeks left of my program and its being spent doing directed research I know I can’t leave here yet! It also helps that the people traveling are my BEST friends here and I don’t want to leave them since we’re all going to be split up around the country soon :( My plans are: get dropped off in Arusha, Tanzania with all of the rest of the students (they will be flying out to Nairobi - I had to cancel this flight and most likely lost all $250 wahh) and spend the night there. We will be taking an early morning bus to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (the buses are each only around $20-30) and spending the night there. We will then be taking a ferry to Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania, where we rented a house for the week on the beach. We will probably only be there 5 nights instead of the full week, but the house was cheap (only around $100 per person) so it doesn’t matter! We’re going to take a ferry to Tanga, Tanzania where there are famous haunted caves that go all the way to Mombasa. We’re probably going to spend a night there and then bus to Mombasa, Kenya and then to Nairobi, Kenya. We’ll spend a night or two in Nairobi depending on what day it is (our flight out to London is on the 19th). And then I’ll be flying from London to Newark and then finally to Chicago on the 20th! So excited that I will be traveling for a week and a half and the whole thing will most likely cost me under $500 :) However, since I do not have ANY appropriate clothes for the beach, me & Averil have been creative and been making our own clothes - cutting up t-shirts into tank tops and cutting jeans into shorts.. woop woop!
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paradise falls.
Yesterday was EASTER and a non-program day. The main highlight of the day was the hike we took in the afternoon to a waterfall in Mto wa Mbu. I’ve mentioned Mto wa Mbu before, its a town at the bottom of a huge escarpment (bottom of the Rift Valley) - we live at the top of the escarpment.. We saw the waterfall on the escarpment we were going to hike up on our drive and it looked VERY similar to Paradise Falls from “UP” :) The hike started out through a banana tree farm and then involved a lot of climbing over & up boulders.. maybe not as intense as the rock-climbing walls at the gym, but I like to think that my awesome abilities on those helped me with this hike ;) We basically hiked up the edge of the waterfall & its streams and ended up looking down over the top of the drop. AMAZING.
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data collection finale.
Today was the last day of data collection for my directed research project. So happy to be done, but so sad that… my camera is gone forever :( We did animal counts in Lake Manyara National Park today, so we get to stand out of the hatches like on safari – our stuff is always just sitting on the roof and apparently my camera fell off somewhere along the way and we didn’t find it in the road on our way back :( Luckily all of my pictures up until today are uploaded onto my computer, but STILL, an expensive camera that will now become a part of the park or be taken by whichever tour guide finds it first.. Anywayyy, besides losing my camera, the rest of the week doing field work was awesome! It was one of the busiest, most stressful weeks EVER since we were out all day and then had assignments to do when we were back, but its finally finished and the experiences we were able to have were actually amazing. I did interviews for 3 days in Maasailand – we went to a bunchhh of bomas and talked to the Maasai about wildlife conflict with their crops and livestock. We had guides who translated for us, but we had to ask them questions in Swahili ourselves first – kind of awkward when they give you a blank stare and the guide repeats the same exact question and they are able to answer lol, but you learn not to let it phase you.. I found a Maasai husband at one boma – I was talking to both and older man and a younger man and they were asking me how long I have been going to school and basically saying that it doesn’t matter because maybe one day I’ll become a teacher or a president, but otherwise I’ll just get married.. and then we joked about me marrying a Maasai warrior (Moran) and they pointed to the younger man who was very good-looking ;) woop woop. There was also a funny situation where Katrina mentioned that she saw a “mzungu matoto” (basically a white child) and our guide was like “really?! where?!” So we went back to the boma and he asked to see the baby.. which was very light-skinned.. and he joked with the mama about it being a mzungu! She claimed that it was light-skinned because it was young, but Katrina & I have our doubts.. Since I don’t have my camera anymore, I guess there probably won’t be many more pictures posts unless I borrow pictures from other people, but I will definitely keep updating! This post wasn’t even as long as it should be – so much more to talk about from this week, but we finally have a night off so I’m going to go enjoy it :)
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