10.17.09

list journal

-last night we played Mafia with twenty people, and i was the narrator.
-i have a tooth ache in the back of my mouth
-we have coldcut sandwiches for lunch every day
-there are songs i forgot to put onto my ipod and now really miss, such as "i'll believe in anything" by wolf parade and "king of carrot flowers" by neutral milk hotel. i'm also missing a lot of sleater-kinney and tegan & sara songs, as well as kimya dawson.
-there are ticks everywhere, but they're tiny
-i miss playing drums and piano in a big way.
-we all take the exact same photographs. once one person takes out their camera or points it at something, everyone follows suit. occasionally annoying
-the first night on safari, i couldn't sleep between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., because i thought i could hear lions. so last night i took benadryl, drank a beer, and left my ipod in my ears.
-i am absolutely gaining weight.
-i finally started wearing my chacos on the coast (now i don't wear anything else)
-i wanted to go straight from london to portland, but it was going to be expensive and i realized i was going to be fat and still experiencing culture shock, so i'm going to austin instead. this probably means i won't see katie or katherine or heather for a full year.
-i should've brought a mandolin.
-i am currently reading 'middlesex' and have lent out my copy of 'perks of being a wallflower,' which has become a popular (quick) read for a lot of the students.
-i got a B+ for my swahili grade (i am bummed out, but a lot of people got that grade)
-i am growing my hair out. this won't mean much, but at least i'm trying...
- last night after we played Mafia, i sat by the fire with heather, rachel, zach, and elly, and we talked about the morgan shaw-fox thing, and it was so niuce talking about serious stuff
-"loose lips" by kimya dawson is so good and i love listening to it on one of the other girls' ipods, even though it brings back difficult memories
-i have been being tentmates with a girl named devin
-we were given 100,000 tanzanian shillings for two days in arusha. i spent maybe 30,000 of it on hotels and food, and pocketed the rest (later note: it came in handy for buying crafts from the people we stayed with).
-i will be working with nicole at the orphanage in olasiti for our independent study project.
-birds are boring. my bio professor cares about nothing but birds.
-i smell awful.
-rachel rogers' birthday was yesterday. devin gave her a slice of watermelon with a candle in it.
-i am now a complete expert on tse tse flies, since i had to research them and talk to our guides about them. their life cycles and adaptive physiological characteristics are pretty interesting, as are some of the crazy ways some people have tried to cope with them (sterilizing a small group of males with high amounts of gamma rays and then releasing them into the wild, since female tse tse only mate once in their lives, even if its with a sterile male)