I'm having a hard time thinking of titles for my posts, perhaps because I don't have any photos to work with. Hmm.

I had my first Swahili lesson today from Zipora, and it went well. We worked a little bit on grammar, but she mostly just told me a story about a researcher she helped in the 80s and I learned new words and tried to translate back. My teacher back in New York was Kenyan, and I'm realizing now that the Tanzanian accent and way of speaking is completely different. Slang is always a challenge anywhere, but here, it's a question of which consonants you inflect in which way. The hard J in Kenyan Swahili is more like a Y here; also the word "hivyo" sounds like "hiyo" here - it's much softer, and also very, very fast. It was funny today, as my teacher tried to figure out how much I knew, and I tried to remember how much I knew. My vocabulary is shot, and people speak so fast. I didn't think I'd ever feel this way, but I'd almost rather be speaking German...but it goes, and it's great to have some structure to the day.

The wind has been blowing off the ocean all day, keeping it cooler and bringing little smatterings of rain. I went out to the University again, which is really far out of Dar - set up way out on hill, you can see the city, and it is a massive, sprawling, green campus. I found one of the people I was looking for, but had no luck with the library. Taking a cab is also expensive compared with the insane little mini-buses (or dalla-dallas), but I don't have the guts to try a minibus alone as bad as my Swahili is. I think my parents are breathing a sigh of relief... ; ) In any case, the university functions on a very early-day schedule, so that people are sometimes out of their offices by 10 am. I'll go back up next week to try the library again, and would love the time to walk around and take pictures.

There are so many things I would like to photograph here, but I don't want to carry my camera around, and I'm trying not to stick out as a total tourist. Charlotte, my newfound grad student friend, suggested just waiting until the last day, when no one can give you any crap if you walk by them again after taking a bunch of photos. She's here for a year, and her Swahili is great, so I feel instantly more comfortable. She lives with a Tanzanian, too, so she's a lot more aware of the cultural and social do's and don'ts. I don't pretend to blend, but it's important to me that it is clearer that I am here to learn and work and not to buy stuff. I'll buy stuff eventually, so maybe it's a bit hypocritical, but the attention you get is a lot different. White people are "mzungu" here, and it's not a bad thing to call someone, I don't think. You can buy t-shirts that say "mzungu" on them, which Thalia helpfully pointed out is like wearing a shirt that says "gringo" in Tijuana or Mexico City. Maybe ironic in LA, but a bit dubious. In any case, there are lots of different and picturesque things - I like the fruit sellers with huge papayas and hands of bananas on their bicycles, and also the kids. A lot of the children here know a few words of English and so you'll hear tiny voices pipe up "how are you!" on the street, especially mornings and evenings. It makes me really miss my nieces and nephews. The architecture is also really interesting, and what graffiti did for me in Berlin, as a strange part of the urban landscape, advertisements do here. The mixtures of English and Swahili are really interesting, too.

I made a joke on our joint blog about bugs, and so far it hasn't been too bad. I've only smacked a few mosquitoes, but the bug that found me in the middle of the night and decided to crawl across my forehead last night (everyone breathe, it was fine) died a quick and painless death. It's bound to happen when you aren't staying at a shishi hotel, and I am not. But my Lutheran lodgings are actually great, now that I'm settled in. The people who work there are nice, and I do feel comfortable and safe there. I am learning how to be polite in Swahili and that has done wonders for talking with the staff and such. I am thinking that I'll stay there for the second week rather than move closer to the Archives as I had planned. I did find out yesterday that we do have a generator and we don't actually have hot water. I was telling myself that it just took a long time to come on in the morning, and so was full of joy when I had a warm shower last evening. But then I realized that it was probably warm from the day's sun...good enough. Dar has trouble with it's power supply, because of trouble with it's water supply. There is a lot of illegal and unmetered tapping onto the water lines, and so the power outages are basically enforced brown-outs. We have a generator, and so always have power. Given what is going on in the midwest and California, this does not really seem anything to worry about. I don't know the latest about St. Louis, but NorCA has been a mess, too.

I had a funny moment last night wishing that I had a Swiss Army knife or Leatherman with me. Stupid thing to leave off your list, really. I have both an oscillating fan on my ceiling and a big AC unit, but both have their different levels of incredible sleep-disrupting noise. The AC unit has a loud "whommmmm" when it cycles on and off, and the fan had a "rt-tat-atat-ttt" combined with a squeeeek just after. So I fussed with the fan, got rid of the rat-at-tat, but made the squeak MUCH worse. I really, really needed a wrench. Given that I had no AC in Berlin and survived, and the vent on the AC makes no noise at all, I went with that. And finally slept through the night. Except for the damned bug.

I am so excited for Kolz to arrive, because it means we're on vacation - even if I'll still be doing some work and trying to meet people when we travel. Apparently a hospital very near Kilimanjaro has an archive and library, and strong "German imprint" according to my advisor. So it'll be a beautiful working vacation, if we can make it. And vacation means a place with a hot shower, too, by God.

Without regular computer access at my room, with-an-i is probably going to be more of a journal than it was in Berlin. I am also learning to write letters again, though I don't know how long it will take to send things. Still on the lookout for those postcards...