The things we're now accustomed to

Eek, we've been here almost 8 weeks, and we want to slow time down so this lasts longer.
We do feel pretty settled here these days with more of an understanding of how things work and what's where in Moshi.  Here are some of the things we realize we are just accustomed to now:

Dust! There are only a few paved roads in our neighborhood. The road in front of our house is dirt, and we haven't had rain in about a month so things are super dusty. We keep our windows open due to the heat, so even just a couple days after a good cleaning, our coffee table has a film of dust on it.
I get to take a yoga class twice per week which I'm loving. It's funny to look around at everyone's feet during class and see how dirty all of our feet are, particularly after wearing flip flops, but even with lace-up shoes the red dust is embedded in the shoes and socks and feet are quite brown.


Coca Cola wins the Coke/Pepsi wars here by a longshot. In every village and town the signs marking a grocery mart, a restaurant, a school all have Coca Cola branded across the top when the sign has nothing to do with the soft drink. It’s very rare to see a Pepsi branded sign.

Discrepancies in clothing - men are nearly all in American/Western style clothing while women are mostly in African print cloth, made into dresses and skirts. The photo at right is perhaps too small to see with the women carrying a super heavy tray of bananas on their heads, but many women wear leggings covered by wrapping their cloth around for a skirt. That's a "dala dala" driving past them, the local public transport option of a mini van stuffed to the gills with people.

Monkeys in the trees and sides of roads. We still think it's fun to go swimming at the school's pool and see monkeys hanging out at the side of the pool or having fun in the trees. Here's a photo of the school's 25meter pool, though we haven't captured the monkeys in a photo. 

Little lizards/geckos in the house. We frequently see little geckos inside our home like this one. We just watch them scamper along the walls and don't even try to get them out. Supposedly they are beneficial and eat the insects in here. We initially thought we had rats outside the house when we saw little mouse or rat sized poops, but our housekeeper laughed and said they were just "juzi" (gecko) poop. For some reason gecko poop is a lot more tolerable than mouse or rat poop on our sandals.






Things are just a little dingy - we were excited to try out the local YMCA pool. Many things here have seen their better days. This pool was an enjoyable way to spend a few hours, it had a diving board which the kids loved, though even that was funny as it was wood and was kinda split down the middle. The deck surrounding the pool had a lot of that red dust on it, and the locker rooms certainly had seen better times. But, the kids loved it and we certainly can't complain as it cost all of $2 to go there.

We would love to have seen Moshi 40-60 years ago when maybe the classic buildings were newer and looked less dingy.

The electricity saga continues with Mon, Wed Fri outages until around 7pm, and lately there have been additional days, like both Saturday and Sunday this past weekend, and then even yesterday (Tuesday) and our first all-night outage. That was a drag as things in the fridge couldn't last through a day and evening of no electricity. These regular outages started around when we arrived in August. We are fortunate that our house has solar lights in the ceilings to light it up a bit. Many homes don’t so that’s pretty hard for students who want to study, and people who run businesses are ready to scream as that is so hard to deal with. Everyone else too really.

The weather –we pretty much don’t need to check the weather reports more than once per week as the days are all the same – high of 85-90 degrees, evenings down to 65, sunny beautiful mornings, sunny hot afternoons and it starts to cool back down by 6pm when we close the doors to limit the mosquitoes. We haven’t had any rain in several weeks. The short rains, should begin in another month, ma

ybe for an hour per day for a couple months. In March/April the "long rains" occur which last longer at a time but maybe not quite as hard. 

Lastly, Msungu is the swahili word for European or white person. Similar to in other countries we've visited, when we ride our bikes outside of our neighborhood where the kids don't see so many white people, they love to start running alongside our bikes yelling "Mzungu!" We just yell back "Watoto!" which is "children!"  Some of the kids are so strong they run alongside us for quite a while - we're on bikes, they're running - impressive!