Wine, cheese and football...

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I know, it sounds blasphemous but it was wonderful! We were able to watch Monday Night Football!!! so what if it was Tuesday afternoon.... Good news, we're pretty sure we can watch it on Mondays and Tuesdays... OK, anyway the  the week was pretty uneventful (shocking). Four good and productive days at work (I almost have my proposal all sorted out) followed by relaxing evenings. Everyday day at work when I go to the bathroom there is water leaking from some where, almost never the sink! At one point there was significantly more water leaking from the pipes to the toilet than I have ever been able to get to come out of the sink... I washed my hands at the pipe that morning... Hey, I told you it was a slow news week.

By Thursday afternoon everything was going great! Everyone I had emailed regarding my project emailed me back (that is a feat in itself), I made a contact to visit an American doctor who works in a rural village in the Lake Victoria region (I can't wait for that!). And, I made travel plans for the weekend. The plan was to take a dhow from the fish market in Bagamoyo to Zanaibar thereby cutting out the long and cramped daladala ride to Dar before the longer and more expensive ferry to Zanzibar- the dhow had a motor just in case there wasn't enough wind. Once there I'd meet up with the Spanish guys I befriended in Arusha.

Then Friday came along... nothing progressed with my project, in fact we took a step or 2 backwards and plans around the dhow ride fell apart. I had said if there wasn't an afternoon boat that I'd be happy to leave at the crack of dawn on Friday but that I definitely wanted to go. Something got lost in translation. When I saw the doctor who was helping me set all this up, I cornered him in the parking lot since I was still waiting for his phone call, he asked me if I had decided whether or not I wanted to go... I thought we had covered that? I assured him I did and he said that there was no afternoon boat so I'd have to wait until midnight. I left out some details about how on Thursday night we went back and forth about the different times and he told me midnight and it would get in at 3am which concerned me a bit but when I called him back he laughed and said, "midnight? no... it leaves early in the morning." There's an additional complicating factor of telling time. You see, if you're speaking in english you generally use Western time but when you're speaking in Swahili you use swahili time which apparently starts at 6am. So when someone tells you a store opens at 3 they probably mean 9am our time. Anyway, after a lot of going back and forth specifying the use of "western time" I was informed the dhow would leave at 3am which meant I would have to wake up someone at the house to let me out and lock the door behind me and I'd have to wake up the driver to take me to the fish market for a boat that, in my opinion, may or may not even exist! I decided not to go... I was also developing a terrible headache.