Weekend Trips!!! Whoo hooo!

Would you like to know what we do on the weekends? Well, I will tell you. After working all week we do like to take some time to relax and party it up in good ol’ Tanzania! J And there are lots of fun things to do and see here, so I will give you just a taste of the few really cool things we have done this summer over the weekends.

Aside from the movies we see, and the safari’s we’ve been on, there are other cool things we’ve done, including a bigger trip to Zanzibar.

We have also gone to see some really cool places like the Shanga Shop, the Snake Park, and the Masai Market. The Shanga Shop is a shop where they take recyclable materials and re-work them into amazing things. They take glass bottles and make beads, tables, chandeliers, and other glass things, they take other materials and make scarves, necklaces, clothes and blankets, and do you want to know the coolest part? Most of the employees there are deaf, mute, or have some other handicap that prevents them from finding a good job in Tanzania. The Shanga Shop provides a way for them to support themselves and their families. The Snake Park is a zoo of sorts specifically for things like snakes, crocodiles, and turtles, as well as some camels that you can ride (which is really weird, and really scary, but really fun!) and some monkeys that like to play with your arm hair if you have a lot of it. The Masai Market is where we do most of our souvenir shopping. The primary tribe where we live is the Masai, and they make all sorts of cool things to sell at this Market, including some baggy African pants that we love, bracelets, machetes, spears, shoes, paintings, and everything you could really want to take home from Africa.

There are also a bunch of different churches here, since most of the Tanzanian people are religious in some way. The LDS church is really cool, and they even make an effort to do some classes in English so that we can understand them. We also went to a Lutheran church with a partner, were blessed (very interestingly) by another partner’s priestess mother, and went to a very lavish first communion for another partner’s nephew. All in all, Tanzania is a beautiful mosaic of different churches and different beliefs living together in harmony.

We hiked deep into a ravine to see a freezing cold waterfall, and then of course had to hike back out. It was very steep, (and personally, I thought I was going to die before I reached the top again) but the waterfall was totally worth it! Our feet were also the cleanest they had been in months from walking in the stream to get to the waterfall. The good news is, no one lost any toes from this freezing cold water. J

The other things we choose to do on the weekends, aside from finding new and exciting (and sometimes sketchy) places to eat, are pretty normal things. We like to have bonfires in our front yard and make our makeshift s’mores with shortbread cookies, galaxy chocolate bars, and strange textured marshmallows. We like to go to Njiro, the mzungu place where we eat dinner and use the free wifi. And we like to get our hair braided like Africans by our friend Elias.

All in all, as exciting as our weekdays are, the weekends are super fun too. The weekends are when we get to let our tourist side show, let loose, and pretend to not have a care in the world. Then reality comes back, Monday comes around, and we turn right back into the responsible hardworking adults that are trying to do their part to help the world.