welcome to africa....

well, where to begin. This is my first internet access for more than 3 minutes since we got here, almost a week and a half ago. So much has happened.

First of all, the flights were terrible. When we got to Nairobi (kenya) they would only let half of us on the plane and said there wasn't enough room for the other 10 of us and that we were to go on this other plane. So we did, but it had already left. 8 hours later Aliyah had to yell at the people to get us on the next flight and we almost missed that, had to run across the tarmac to make the flight, so obviously when we got to Dar es Salaam our bags didn't. Half of the other groups bags didn't make it to Mwanza either. So we were supposed to get on a flight at 6pm but they gave 10 out of 11 of us boarding passes then said there wasn't enough room! Soooo, after another 6 hours of yelling at them, we forced them to put us on the flight at 6 the next morning, we got our tickets and got out of there. It had now been around 45 hours of flights/transit.

For that night we went to this awesome street side bbq where only locals go. It was awesome. We asked Aliyah what area of the city it was and she said 'the hood'. awesome. a big shock for a lot of people who hadn't been out side of canada. There was a big group of us so it wasn't dangerous or anything. plus we had a guy with a gun gaurding our money and everything that was in the van. Then we went to the hotel for a shower and slept for a few hours, got up at 3am and went to the airport. There all of our bags had arrived and we got on the plane to Mwanza and everything was fine.

Mwanza was really nice, we stayed there for 3 days, it is quite a prosperous city for Africa because of the fishing industry so everyone is in nice clothes and everything. we didn't do a whole lot there, walked around a bit, went to this dance show thing, and just tried to get used to the time change.

Then we went on on Safari. It was really fun, some people weren't to into the camping thing but it was fun i thought. We saw a ton of animals, the big 5 (Rhino, Elephant, leopard, buffalo, lion) We saw 22 lions, one was right beside the road, i have some good pictures. A leopard is really rare to see and we saw 3 of them. we saw cheetahs, a million zebras and wildabeasts, hippos, warthogs (pumbas! :)) and so many more things i can't remember them all. We almost got eaten by lions for the first 2 nights. They kept coming into our campsite. Once Tayler and I got up to go to the bathroom at about 10:50 and when i was waiting for her i heard soemthing big move in the tree so i didn't say anything but we just went back and then 10 minutes later the safari guys were like simba simba (lion in swahili) and right befoe that i had heard them sniffing by my tent right outside the door and we heard them make their lion noises right outside. Then the guys had to get in their trucks and chase them away. Pretty much the same thing happened the second night too. Theeeeen the 3rd night... basically to put it shortly, i fell in the sewer. i was walking in the dark back to my tent and fell in the sewer. disgusting. i got over it quickly, i'm glad it was me not one of the other girls because i don't think some of them would have handeled it to well. I thought it was funny.

We went to see a maasai village where they have kept the old culture ways, i won't got into explaining those, but they are in the middle of no where living in mud huts made out of cow poop. quite unfortunate, espeically for the women, they don't get treated very well. And we saw the crater (8th wonder of the world), it was pretty amazing, pictures don't do justice. We had an awesome guide, his name was joeseph, he was so funny and smart!

We just got to our hotel now, it is soooo nice, bath tub and real shower. sit toilet. internet. back to civilization! I should be able to write more often, we are in cities from now on. The school work isn't too heavy, Aliyah is pretty cool about most things, she's here for fun not all school which is good for us!!

Anyway, this is enough for now!