... the trek north ...

Monday, April 21, 2008

I love Rainy Season

So I love rainy season. The rain gets kind of annoying, the termites are crazy (see my previous post about Termite Attacks) but the fruit that is out this season is AMAZING!!!! I tell my friends that we just don’t get stuff like this back in the States- we definitely don’t get anything this fresh, but I’ve never seen most of these fruits at my local Meijers! I mean we are talking passion fruit, tree tomatoes, guava, mangoes, pineapples, pears and some other fruits I’ve never heard of or seen before in my life!


This is my kikapu- or the basket I carry all my veggies and fruit in from the market.

So here is passion fruit- it comes in a few different colors, but basically you peel off the hard shell (kind of like an egg) and eat the seeds that are encapsulated in the juice. It’s really good- a little bitter and it kind of looks like a brain but yummy!




Tree tomatoes are super sour and the juice stains pretty much everything, but they are really good in fruit salad.


I still don’t know what this one is called- I’ve asked friends, people in the market no one can tell me what it’s called. It’s kind of like passion fruit- sour and you eat the little seed/juice capsules inside and this one is CRAZY sour.



And this one, I don’t know what this one is called either. And I don’t know what it tastes like because I’m still waiting for it to ripen (the mama in the market told me to wait a week before I try it) but I’m told it had the texture of a mango but it almost sickeningly sweet. I guess we’ll see.


Thursday, April 10, 2008

Nimemaliza!!!

Today was my last day of class!!! I'm done with all my tests (which I did very well on) and now I'm fluent- well not fluent- at all- but I have a really good base for learning more Swahili as I go.

So here is my wenzangu (fellow classmates) and wallimu (teachers):

And here is the sign we put over our classroom- it says "the class of the complainers". We put up the sign because we love the word "wanung'unikaji"- it's fun to say!!! But we also were a class that lived up to our name- we were pretty good at complaining in Swahili!

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

1 MORE TEST!!!!

So tomorrow (Wednesday) is my final test in my kiswahili class!!! I took my written final last week and got a 96% (which I am pretty proud of- especially considering I ended up having to explain the concept of Independence Day and "no taxation without representation" in Swahili, but that was kind of my own fault- I got a little carried away in my essay! I tend to think bigger then my vocabulary- I forget that I don't know all the words I do in English until its too late to turn back, so I end up coming up with some pretty creative ways to explain stuff!)

Now tomorrow is my oral final- more challenging then the written final to be sure, but I think I'll be fine. It just depends on how tricky my teachers want to be- I have an idea of what they will ask, but they can ask pretty much anything they want!!

So keep me in your prayers as I finish up at language school!

Completely unrelated, but here is a chameleon I found in my yard! The are so fun to watch!