It's hot here! It’s just been rainy season which has been refreshing but also very humid. We spent our first 2 weeks on the Island with a local family in a 5th floor flat quite central to Stone Town. This was a useful experience as we learnt a lot from the family and made some good friends. We lived like the locals which includes eating with our hands and having spicy soup with bits of octopus in it for breakfast! Our days were spent walking around the streets of Stone Town browsing and trying out our few Swahili phrases on the local shopkeepers. Many evenings we went out visiting numerous members of the family which is quite complicated as most men have more than one wife!

Our first impression of Stone Town is that it is very safe and the people are very friendly. The whole of Africa is madly in love with Barak Obama! There is an Obama tree in Stone town which is dedicated to him and you can even buy Kanga’s (sarongs) with his face printed on them!

We have been staying with friends for the past 2 weeks and have just moved into our own house which we will stay in for about 3 months. Until we moved into our house we spent most days going out to the local shops and buying a coke, learning new words and phrases, playing draughts and making friends with the many men who just hang out everywhere. We are slowly learning the language through these conversations and plan to go to the language school in January. We have also enjoyed being able to go for a quick dip in the sea to cool off just before the sun goes down every day which is great and is only about a 5 minute drive.

We have been trying to put up some photos but this has proved difficult with the internet connection we are using at the moment. We will try and put some up as soon as we can.

Hello, we thought that we would create this blog to keep you up to date on what we are up to.




We are currently in Kenya where we have spent three weeks in a town called Machakos where we learnt lots about African culture etc. This was great fun, we met lots of great people and learnt important African skills like how to catch a Boda Boda, (a ride on the back of a push bike), or in a Tuc Tuc, (see photo).









We spent one day at 'Small Worlds' which is a game park with good food. This photo shows us with a few of our new friends on top of a Land Cruiser (A Land Rover would have been better!) for our safari. We saw lots of animals such as giraffes (see blog title photo!), zebras, ostriches, etc.











Last week we went to Kijabe which is north west of Nairobi for our language course. Kijabe has a good hospital and an international school (a mini America). The course consisted of learning how to learn a language and practicing it with our language helpers at the shops.


Kijabe overlooks the Rift Valley which you can see in the photo and several inactive volcanoes.