Today marked the end of our short stay in Arusha. Most definitely, the hardest thing about leaving this hotel will be the breakfasts – for two days I have been gloriously reunited with my beloved milo and weetbix. It's been incredible! I have missed them both very much (despite only being here for under a week).
Unfortunately, today also marked the start of a couple of days apart for Justin and me. Justin is seizing the opportunity to fulfil his lifelong dream of going on safari, while I'm heading back to the hospital for another week. So we checked out of our hotel, jumped into a taxi, dropped Justin off with his tour group and I headed back to Machame. We even managed to avoid all types of major collision this time, so things were looking up!
Back at the hospital, I finally met the two Dutch fifth-year medical students, Analie and Daniel ("Daan"), who are living in the unit next to ours. They had been at one of the hospital's remote outreach clinics all last week and came back only yesterday.
So the five of us in Machame (Anna, Emmy, Analie, Daan and me) cooked up a feast to share together as a group for dinner. We even managed to source a beer each, having discovered the hard way how unexpectedly complex it is to buy one here in Tanzania. You can't just walk into a shop and buy a beer – there's a whole process behind it. You must already have an empty glass bottle, which is a bit like the chicken and the egg because unless you've already bought a beer, you don't have any empty bottles. It's taken the two Dutch students six weeks to find only five! Once you have these bottles though, you can take them to the shop and exchange them for full ones. I imagine it would make being an alcoholic highly inconvenient.
After a delicious dinner, we went along to a party at the hospital hosted by the local students for all the young people (plus this really old dude with a walking stick. He actually busted out some pretty impressive dance moves though! Respect.) Everyone lined up in the pews of the chapel and there was lots of choreographed dancing and singing of Swahili gospel hymns (wimbo). It was a lot of fun!
After a long day, I went to bed in anticipation of another interesting and exciting week ahead!
Michael
Things that went wrong: Day 7 edition
- Nothing much actually! We're clearly getting better at this whole living in Africa thing.
- It was a bit of a shame to part ways, but this way we might not get sick of each other for a little bit longer yet!
No comments:
Post a Comment