Home!

Hey Everybody,

We have successfully made it home and fortunately we were not on the troubled flight out of Amsterdam. It was quite the amazing trip and we don't stand a chance of trying to summarize it here. We have put a new link to our flickr pictures on the right hand side of the blog (over there -->). Its also here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/41956500@N05/ . We'll be putting up more pictures over the week, so check it out.

We hope you're having a wonderful time over the holidays and we'll see you all soon!

-Zahra and Max

Snow!

So while many of you have been enduring snow for many weeks now, our arrival in Amsterdam marked our first snow encounter of the year. Apparently snow is relatively rare here, as all of their transportation infrastructure more or less shut down from about 1.5" of the fluffy stuff. Regardless of this, the city looks quite nice.

We have successfully met up with Owen (of The Washed Rind), and as neither of us have cell phones here, this marks quite an achievement. We have spent the past two days seeing sites, including the Van Gogh museum and Anne Frank house, drinking beers, and wandering through the snowy streets.

We can't believe we'll be heading home so soon, but we can't wait to see everyone!

Until next time,
Z&M

Amsterdam Bound

This post was written on Sunday 12/20

***

Greetings from Athens airport,

Currently Amsterdam is being blanketed in white in preparation for Christmas. An unfortunate side effect of this is that we are now facing an indeterminate delay.

Aside from this minor hiccup, our trip to Athens has been amazing. Chris was a fantastic host, showing us the best of Greek food, music, history, drinks, and food. Here in bullet form, we will give you the highlights.

• Visiting Greek food markets, including the central market and the local lykee where amazing and amazingly cheep fresh produce is sold

• Cheese: while one would think that we got our cheese fix in Italy, it was only a preview for Greece. Here we experienced the wonder of having grilled and fried cheeses as the primary protien for many meals, whether as the filling on a breakfast pastery, or served alongside salads, bread and legumes for dinner.
  

• Finding some truely authentic establishments, including an unmarked cellar restaurant and local live "Greek Blues" bar. Our lunch in the cellar restaurant was complete with being scolded for even asking where to sit, followed by joining a table with another couple who proceeded to buy us several rounds of Greek resin wine. During our visit to the bar, Chris promised that we would see some drunk people performing traditional dances. He delivered on this promise, although he was the only one to perform, much to the delight/dismay of the other patrons.
  

• The sites: Of course no trip to Athens is complete without seeing the Acropolis and many other ancient wonders. We found our favorite on a day trip excursion to the magnificient Temple of Poisidon. The remains of this temple sit up upon a cliff overlooking the sea in the town of Sunio. It is truely a miraculous site.
  

• The people: seeing and doing everything greek was a great time, but it was just as great to spend time with Chris. We were also fortunate to catch up with our friend Ioannis, who we went to Brown with, and had previously attended the high school where Chris currently works.
  

Yia su (hello) from Greece!

Yesterday, we arrived in Athens safe and sound. But before I elaborate on our going-ons here, I will provide a couple more details about our Rome excursion.

Rome was beautiful and wonderful, but a bit dizzying. We often ventured out to see the sites (including the pantheon, spanish steps, the forum, the trevy fountain and st. peter's basillica) in a rather unstructured way: we just took random turns and eventually 
stumbled upon these historical monuments. Though the tour books warned of long
lines, we were fairly lucky. Our favorite destination was the Pantheon which we ended up returning to a couple times and even ate dinner across from it one night.

In Rome, Christmas is in the air. Lights lined the winding alley ways and santas littered the streets. There were even a couple festivals, complete with carnival games, cotton candy, and booths of christmas chatchkas (spl?). 

Besides site seeing, we spent a lot of time eating carbohydrates. We had pizza 4 times in 5 days. We hope to transition from the cheese, bread and wine heavy Italian diet to a more healthy mediterrean one; although, we were recently informed that Greece consumes the most cheese per capita of any nation. Tonight we hope to find some good healthy food with dinner at a traditional Greek restaurant.

Though we are only starting our Greek section of the trip, we have already mastered the public transportation system, visited the acropolis, and learned that coffee is outrageously expensive in Greece.

Over and out,
Z & M

Out of Africa

Hello from Rome. We have completed the Tanzania portion of our trip, and its hard to believe its over. We have actually almost finished the Italy portion of our trip as well, as we will be wrapping up our 5 day sprint through Rome tomorrow. We have seen all the big sites, and eaten all the staple foods. After 3 months of limited cheese, pasta, and coffee we have been on quite a binge.

Tomorrow we will be flying to Athens where we will be meeting up with none other than Mr Chris Duffy (of the Daily Feta). We couldnt be more excited. Hopefully we will find some better internet there and will give you a more complete rundown of the europe leg of our trip, as well as some pictures.

Ciao,
-Z&M

The Safari Within the Safari

Hello family and friends!

We've had a very busy past week. We have wrapped up our time in Moshi, and have just returned to Dar es Salaam, where we will be spending our final 3 days in Tanzania.

Last week we were out in the bush, as they say, on safari. We visited 3 national parks including Lake Manyara, the Serengeti and Ngorogoro Crater. All three of these parks have amazing landscapes and wildlife. Words can do the trip no justice at all, and our pictures will only just begin to give you a sense of what we saw. We took over 1000 shots (Max was a little trigger happy around the cats) and will try to post some of the better ones as our Internet connection allows. We really saw every animal one could hope to see including lions (over 40), cheetahs, leopards, elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, zebras, and many more.

Our first stop was Lake Manyara, about a 5 hour drive out of Moshi. The lake is located on the edge of the East African Rift, which is a steep 600 meter ridge created by a separation of tectonic plates. In this park we saw many elephants, baboons, and monkeys, as well as a few giraffes and hippos. After a few hours of driving around, we ascended the ridge and arrived at the beautiful Lake Manyara Lodge overlooking the park. The day was a fantastic preview of what was to come.

Next up was the Serengeti. This required another long drive which took us along the rim of Ngorogoro crater, where we were able to look over what was to be our final destination. The Serengeti, home of the Lion King, is even more amazing than billed. The plains stretch all the way to the horizon, and mini forests and rock outcroppings, known as kopjes, dot the landscape. We were fortunate to come during the migration season, when thousands of wildebeest, impalas, and zebras are trekking across the grasslands. This great scene is made even better by the great number of predators attracted to this feeding opportunity. We can only hope that our pictures begin to show how amazing the sites were.

Finally, after two days in the Serengeti, we returned to Ngorogoro crater and made an early morning decent to the crater floor. Ngorogoro is believed by creationists, and Zahra's mom, to be the Garden of Eden. One look and it is easy to see why. In the relatively small crater, averaging 26km in diameter a wide variety of animals including lions, flamingos, elephants, zebras, and the rare rhino reside. Once again, we hope our pictures will begin to give you a sense of this amazing place.

So after making our way back to Moshi, we did our last bit of packing and got a little sleep before heading out yesterday morning. On our way to Dar, we stopped by Zahra's Mom's village, Kwakombo, for lunch and said hello to her village family. Made it into Dar in the evening and went out for dinner with Zahra's family.

So here we are, wrapping up our time in Tanzania. We hope you enjoy the pictures from our safari!

-Zahra and Max

Happy Thanksgiving

It is a bit bizarre being in a country where everything is open and turkeys are still available on Thanksgiving day. We, however, will not be cooking a turkey. Our microwave size oven can barely hold a chicken, let alone a full-fledged turkey. But in patriotic spirit, we are still having a big buffet style family dinner with our housemates and some close friends. So far the menu includes chicken and veggies (max), sweet mashed potatoes with marshmellows (me) and regular mash potatoes for max (also me), either zuccini bread or carrot cake, a pie, and spinach. There may also be some more traditional Tanzanian pieces including chapati...

A large market run is in order for later today, but currently we are still "on the clock". With only two days left of work to go and a boss who has never heard of Thanksgiving, it is fair to say that we still have to work for a couple hours this morning. Our volunteer position has been a big success and we have paved the way for future volunteers (Max is currently working on an idealist.org post).

In other news, this week has been rather quiet. It took us around 5 days to recover from the mountain. Our muscles were fine by day 2, but our colds lingered. Now, our attention is focusing on my mother's upcoming visit (this monday!) that will coincide with a 5 day safari trip to Lake Manyara, the Serengetti, and Ngorogoro Crater. After that we will officially be done with Moshi...but we still have over a week before that happens!

Anyways, we are off. Hope you all enjoy your turkey (or tofu-turkey), afternoon of football or soccer, and family.

love,
zahra and max