The new house

So finally moved into my new house. It's so cute I have to keep pinching myself. I'm trying to ignore the annoyance I feel at how poor the support is that PSI is providing and focus on how great the place is. It's in a quiet neighborhood back pretty far from the road- although there's a surprising amount of noise (seems to be a dog gang). It's a three bedroom, 3.5 bath cottage. It also has a two bedroom guesthouse in the back yard and a two car garage. And the backyard contains a bar for outdoor entertaining (can be seen a bit in the second picture - that wood thing). There's also a rusty multi-colored children's play set with a slide and swings that I'm a little worried about.

So far there's not much to say about it. I don't have any furniture so I'm borrowing a bed and a table/chairs from PSI who seemed to have them floating around. I got eaten alive by mosquitos the first night so got a net from work as well. And I'm borrowing plates, a blanket and one pot from a colleague. I had the living room, dining room and master bedroom painted while I was in Tanzania last week and I spent my first night putting up the manger scene and fake tree. Reminded me of doing exactly that 3 years ago when I moved into the empty place in India and had no furniture except the table, piano and christmas tree!

Since the house came with a gardener and the place looks great, I kept him on staff and am trying out a housekeeper that the sister of my colleague's housekeeper. The gardener's great and he washes my car every morning. Still not sure about the housekeeper - hard to measure up to Tenzing. The cat seems to be settling in slowly. She did well the first day, spent most of the day running around like crazy and loudly meowing to see where I was. And then at 4pm she conked out and slept in a drawer the rest of the day. Then early in the morning of the first night I slept there I awoke to a low growling sound and realized another cat had come in a window and was now in my bedroom. That sorely shook Kali and she hid for a few hours after.

Can't wait for the dryer to arrive (my cloths feel horribly stiff) and for my shipment to arrive, which will likely happen the day before I leave for Christmas R&R. It would be nice if the stove worked but that might just be too much to ask for.

Tanzania

I'm not sure I've ever spent a week in a country and felt like I had less of an opinion. Maybe it's because Dar Es Salaam is not that different than Kenya or maybe because I spent most of the week on the peninsula, which is where most of the expats live so I feel like I didn't even really see Tanzania. I came to participate in part of a training as well as get to know our program.

The first hotel we stayed at, the Sea Cliff, had a major fire earlier this year so most of the hotel was still undergoing renovations. The only part that was open, where we stayed, was in the middle of essentially a food court - with Subway and a big bouncy castle and everything. Very surreal. So after a few nights we moved to a little boutique hotel with no sign board on a dirt road that was very pretty but also strange. So for the work week we really didn't see many tanzanians. I would go for afternoon jogs (office hours were 8:30am-4:15pm so it was nice to leave work during daylight). There were paths near the cliffs to jog along where people seemed to come for afterwork picnics and there were no mzungus (white people) there at all. (the first picture is from that, the other two from my colleague's house on the beach - all bad quality iphone photos). But when I jogged the neighborhoods they were quite luxurious and mostly white.

On Saturday a colleague and I (also from Kenya) decided to walk around to various shops and head into Dar proper. Dar had nothing really to offer. Much smaller city than I'm used to for capitals (actually it's not the capital, which is dodoma - but it's the HQ of most of TZ) and still you get hassled pretty much. The waterfront is unfortunately mostly a shipping port so not many beaches (if any) to be found. I'm coming back in January so I hope to see more of the country and get more of a sense of what life's like here. My take aways are that living here would mean living in white people land - which is bizarre. It's hot here. Not as temperature hot as Delhi (I'm guessing it's 90s-100F) but the heat is all from the sun. I walked a lot today (Sunday) and couldn't get over the difference when I was in shade. And it struck me that that never happened in Delhi. The city was hot and it could be totally clouded over and still 120F. Shade was only a minor improvement where here it felt 20 degrees cooler. It's much quieter than Nairobi and having a beach around means there's lovely restaurants overlooking the ocean and nice jogs, walks. People in general were laid back. Walking alone today I didn't really know where I was going and several people were just so friendly and helpful.

Zanzibar's only like an hour from here so I'll definitely have to schedule that in for next time!