Weekend in Zanzibar

Friday July 23rd:

I don't remember much of my English lesson except for conversatio topic strips which they thought were hilarious. They always laugh when I introduce something new. This could be for many reasons one of which that they think I'm crazy. I just want to shake things up a bit. Nothing groundbreaking just a bit different. The lesson went on with some other things grammar included but I have to say my heart just wasn't in it. I was going to Zanzibar today!

After lunch we met up with Kennedy but soon realized that a few of us had forgotten things. Ben especially had a problem because his passport was locked in his room cabinet. Turned out that Andrew his roommate had the key, so Ben took off with one shoe on Ariel's bike "Fairy" and went in search of Andrew. Turns out again that the key was in Andrew's pants pocket on his bed at the summer house the whole time. There was also a small flip flop mishap, but all was good in the end and we got to the port safely.

The ferry ticket transaction was a bit questionable because we all had to sit in the van while Kennedy took our passports to "buy tickets." We speculated that many other things could have been going on and that we all may be stuck in Tanzania indefinitely. Finally after sitting in the sweltering van for much longer than we needed to we got in a "special line." It wasn't actually a line at all. We just got to go ahead of everyone waiting in line because we were with shady Kennedy. We ended up in first class too which was lucky because it was air conditioned and we got to watch old eposides of candid camera. The boat ride was not the most fun ever, very rocky, but two long hours later we were in ZANZIBAR (the original spice island and the hub of slave trade in East Africa).

I could go on for a long time about my excursion to Z-bar, but I have been sitting at the internet cafe for over an hour now and I am exhausted. Let me sum up the weekend like this. We stayed at a nice place called Sunset Bungalows right on the beach. The water was absolutely beautiful and bright blue with really old boats dotting the shore line. We ate pizza and burgers, and we had a fabulous time. Saturday night there was a full moon party which was something to experience. I can tell people about this at another time.

Sunday morning we woke up and headed over to Stone Town to do some shopping and see the sights. I bought a lovely tanzanite necklace and did my fastest jewelry transaction in history. I think I got a pretty good deal too! After a quick lunch and a race to the ferry it was time to go home. We ended up hitting a lot of traffic from Dar to Baga, so we spent a lot of time in the bus/van again. We also had to stop on the side of the road because we thought we hit something. Turned out it was a "rubber" as our driver called it. I'm thinking it was some sort of belt, but we kept moving. It was a really great weekend, and it is getting me really excited for safari next weekend.