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Most likely I'll post some pics as part of whatever update I give, and given that there is no way all three of my daughters will think that they look good in the same photo at the same time, pics will likely be pulled and right there is your incentive to check back every day to see how things actually went before something gets taken down.This section will contain the running commentary from the trip, in regards to the most recent country we have been in. But once I'm able to start the next country, I'll put the historical posts in the "Old Updates - XYZ" tab above. This all assumes I (or one of my kids) will be able to figure out how to make this website work.

If you want to read about the first 28 days and our time in Italy, then click here.

If you want to read about our time in Turkiye, then click here.

If you want to read about our safari in Kenya, then click here.

The Journey Continues - Tanzania

To jump directly to one of our days in Zanzibar, click here:

DAY 43

Our first day in Zanzibar. The ride from the airport to our house the night before was pretty sketchy. It was 3:30 AM, and many of the places we passed looked run down. And for how late at night it was, there were actually a large number of people sitting at the sides of the roads. At one point, there was a roadblock set up that looked only semi-official, and for a few minutes we wondered if we were going to be robbed or something (what kind of roadblock is set up a 4AM?), but they eventually waved us through.

Another thing that was strange was that in the dash of the van there was a TV. The driver was playing music, and it was showing the music videos of the songs that were playing. It seemed like potentially a very distracting thing for the driver, particularly during the night. It was distracting to me, for sure, when from time to time there were strobe lights in the videos creating blinding light.

The drive was over an hour, but soon we were going through a little town, and then turned off the poorly paved main road onto an unpaved side street, and down a couple more turns. The neighborhood increasingly looked more and more sketchy. We pulled up to our house which in the dark looked nice, but was situated in between two houses that were run down and looked potentially abandoned. We knew that the area wasn’t great, since the house comes with 2 security guards, but I wondered if Megan was going to say we would have to leave. But it was so late and we were so tired, that we just went to bed.

The house has 4 king sized beds, which meant that Liam was going to have to sleep with someone, and he was in Elenna’s room. I always felt like I was penalized growing up, being the youngest kid - even when I grew bigger than my two brothers, I was made to sit in the middle seat (the hump seat) in our cars because of my low status as the youngest. Instead of seeing injustice in this, I generally continue this policy with our kids - Keira always sits in the front seat if an adult isn’t the car, and Elenna and Liam won’t always share a room, but will do so more often than other pairings with Liam.

The best room in the house was the lone second floor bedroom with a balcony overlooking the water, but given how sketchy the neighborhood looked at night, Megan and I took the ground floor room with the view of the beach and gave Keira the view of the ocean.

At 11AM, Haji, our driver/house manager, called to say that the airport had our luggage and asked if they should deliver it, or if he should get it. The night before, we had tentatively planned for him to get it, because apparently there is no address for the houses in this area, so we couldn’t tell the airport where to send it. I told him that if they could deliver it, that was fine (would save us having to pay him to get it), but without an address, I didn’t know how they could find it.

At this point, something came up that I probably should have mentioned before - there was a clear lack of communication/understanding with the other person. We went back and forth for about 10 minutes about what I wanted him to do. I thought I was pretty clear that if they could deliver them, then they should, but apparently I wasn’t.

But this was not the only instance of miscommunication on our trip. The woman in Cefalu who rented us the car, complained that our accents were difficult to understand. Wanje, our driver on safari also had difficulty understanding us from time to time. The maids in this house didn’t understand us - we would tell them that we didn’t like the papaya in the fruit salad, so they didn’t need to keep adding it to the salad, and they would take the fruit salad bowl, which was now only papaya, and put it into the fridge in case we wanted it later. Generally, they weren’t big issues, they just took an extra few times to explain and then they understood, but interesting because I don’t think that I have an accent. Although I guess that my mom complains that I mumble and she can’t understand me sometimes, so maybe that’s it, but these people also had difficulty understanding Megan and Robin, too. Its probably more that English was all their second language, and Its impressive that they can understand Americans at all.

So eventually, we agreed that the airport would deliver the bags, and we set a time to go grocery shopping. The house will make us breakfast for free, and we can pay them $100 to make us lunch or dinner for the family, but we had gotten into the habit of making our own dinners in Cefalu, and were hoping to eat a bit more normally, after spending 2 weeks eating at Italian restaurants, and then 10 days eating at all inclusive safari resorts.

Haji brought me to a grocery store that was on the second floor of a little shop area. The store was about twice the size of the small bodega in Cinque Terre and had a decent selection of snacks and pastas, but no pasta sauce (only tomato paste), no bread, no fruit, no frozen food and no meats. It also didn’t sell hair conditioner or contact solution, so we went to a fruit stand. It was a bit run down, and we were wary of buying anything that needed to be washed, so I bought a couple of bananas, a watermelon and a couple of mangoes.

Then we went to another grocery store and bought a couple of things and I was getting worried that I couldn’t find hair conditioner or contact solution, but then I saw a pharmacy. It was a small shop about 15x15 ft that was very similar to the pharmacies I visited in Cefalu and Cinque Terre. The first one I went to didn’t have contact solution but had conditioner. The second one also didn’t have contact solution, but he gave directions to our driver on where to get “the last bottle”. We went there, and there was only one bottle in the store and I got it.

Now the last thing on the list was some chicken so we could make dinner. So far I had been to about 5-6 different “supermarkets” (I used the term supermarket because they all did on their signs, but only one would have vaguely resembled a US supermarket in size (most were the size of bodegas), but even that one would be small for the US, and the shelves were somewhat bare - somewhat like a supermarket right after a major storm/hurricane when the store has some delay in restocking the shelves and there are a bunch of things missing). But none of the stores had a frozen food section or sold meat.

So I asked Haji and he stopped at one place, and they told him they didn’t have any chicken. So he went to another place and he told me that this place would have chicken, “but it wouldn’t be in a bag”. At that point, I decided we didn’t really need chicken and we headed home.

When I got home, none of my daughters were awake and at 3pm, so we had Liam go wake them all up. We spent a day recuperating from 8 days of safari followed by getting to our house at 5am. We hadn’t had breakfast, so Liam and I ate french bread with Nutella that I bought. Its amazing how Liam has gone from being allergic to hazelnuts to LOVING nutella after going through his OIT treatment.

Nutella is a family favorite, even for Liam.

Megan made dinner, and then Keira, Megan and I played more Rummy 500 by ones, drinking some Malibu rum I had bought and creating a nice dad joke in the process.

DAY 44

After so much traveling, we pretty much decided that we would have a number of lazy days at home where the kids could do school work and everyone could sleep. There was also plenty of travel to plan, as well as home school lesson plans that Megan had to organize and school work for Liam.

The cooks made breakfast in the mornings which was really good - the scrambled eggs were good, and the avocado toast was also good (according to Megan and Lily). They also made these pancake/pastry things, and once you put some Nutella on them, they tasted like some of the best chocolate donuts you have ever had. It was pretty much the same eggs and avocado toast every day, but the fried bread changed form each day (once pancakes, once actual donuts), but was generally pretty good (expecially with Nutella)

In between, we would take a dip in the pool. At least Liam, Megan and I would. Keira, Lily and Elenna eventually used the pool, but Elenna was the last one to do so - about Day 5.

Megan and I will often rent a house with a pool, or choose the hotel with the pool, but none of the kids seem to want to use it, except Liam.

Or maybe go in the ocean.

The ocean water was warm nice. But only Liam, Megan and I know that.

The water was beautiful to look at, and reading on our porch, listening to the waves crash and looking up every once in a while at the view was certainly one of my favorite things to do. For some reason, there was a bed put out on the porch and usually at least one of our kids would be on it, reading.

Having a bed on the porch is kind of random. But also kind of awesome.

One problem was that the internet here isn’t good. We spend about 2 hours a day of combined time between the 6 of us trying to get our devices connected, or waiting while we get the spinning circle of death while we wait for things to load. In part that was the reason there was a decent amount of time between when we got here and our first post - the website just wouldn’t load.

The first night we were here, there was a pickup soccer game happening almost right outside our window, on the beach, in front of the waves. It reminded me a lot of Fayson, with the water, the setting sun and people just coming together to have fun. It felt very magical.

The sunset here is unreal.

DAY 45

So at this point, after my post about the first night driving to our house, I’m wondering why my mom hasn’t texted me about if we are safe here, which probably means that she stopped reading this blog. Well, the answer is yes, we generally do feel safe. Everything looks a little worse off at 4am in the morning than it does in the sunlight. And although the houses on either side of us are a bit run down, it is clear that its more a function of a storm that came through some time ago and hasn’t been repaired. One house is well on its way to restoration. Beyond those houses, there are generally rows of small boutique hotels. No name brands, and if you walked 30 minutes in either direction, you might only find 1 that looked like it was an actual upscale resort, but the vast majority look nice, and are places that I’m sure we would be quite happy staying in. Megan said she could see coming back here in 10 years and it having all been built up.

But once you go behind the ocean front buildings, the poverty becomes a bit more apparent. In the day, I have no concerns walking along the side streets by myself. At night time though, we generally stay inside and close and lock our doors when the sun goes down. This is probably more about the unknown than real risk. In the US, poverty and crime often go together but here, there really has been nothing but positive attitudes from the locals an no hint of dander. If you walk the beach, people will try to sell you things, but they aren’t everywhere you look, the way they can be in other locations, and they aren’t too pushy and will walk away if you say “no.” Still, the fact that two guards come with the house, probably means that the feeling that we should lock our doors is not 100% unwarranted.

The ocean water is beautiful to look at, and it is the temperature of bath water. The water here has been pretty calm, no big waves, but there is a bit of a current that slowly pulls you down the beach. The main issue with the beach is that there are sea urchins in the ocean, which means that you have to wear water shoes when you go in. My feet are size 12, and I didn’t have room for sandals and water shoes in my suitcase, so I just used my sandals, which makes swimming a little more difficult. The second time I went swimming I just ditched it and went barefoot, so hopefully I won’t regret it.

The other thing about the tide is that it goes way out. And I mean way out. When the water is high tide, it comes all the way up to the rock wall in front of our house but when the tide is out, it goes out for hundreds of yards. One day, Megan and I decided that we would take the kids out onto the flats during low tide, so everyone except Lily (who had work to do), came out. As we walked out, we quickly found that our feet started to stick into the sand. It was like a muddy clay, and quickly the girls found that their water shoes were getting stuck and not coming up when they lifted their feet. Elenna and Keira, who rarely left the house and were not on board with this little foray to begin with, decided we should turn around and Megan soon agreed. If not for the threat of sea urchins, I would have kept going without shoes, but in the end, we all turned around.

The high tide (above) the water comes up to the wall. At the low tide, it goes out quite far.

We were running low on some things, so Megan, Liam and I decided to walk and find some grocery stores. I remembered from the time I went shopping that there was a main road, about 4 blocks from our house, so we went out on an adventure.

We walked through the town on dirt roads, and there were a bunch of little bodegas that were about half the size of the bodegas in Cinque Terre, that usually had Pringles, some rice, soda and a few other things. These were sprinkled in between run down houses. We kept going a few blocks and passed a few restaurants and we made some mental notes to come back and try one later in the week.

Food has been a bit of a conundrum for us. We live in constant fear of getting sick, and every time we drink something with ice, or eat something that has fresh vegetables washed in the local water, we are afraid. So we feel like we should be eating more authentic foods, but also that we don’t want to get sick. That is part of the reason that we are cooking on our own a lot, beyond the fact that its much cheaper to do so and the safari portion of our trip was well above budget.

We made it out to the main road, and on the corner there was a modern-type strip mall with a restaurant, grocery store and gelato place. We got some ice cream as a reward for Liam walking with us, and as an extra added bonus there was a swing set. Liam went on the swings for a while and when we left that area to go to the grocery store, he said, “we have to tell my sisters that they missed all the fun!”.

This grocery store was nice, but maybe 1.5 the size of a little bodega and there wasn’t any meat. But there was Rice Crispies, milk, and nutella, so that got us a few more days of food.

Since the stores don’t sell fruit, we had to get the fruit at a road side fruit stand. They sell these mini-bananas that Liam loves - he has been averaging something like 4 a day since we got here.

Going grocery shopping.

We eventually got Keira and Elenna to go for a walk.

Why did it take so long to get them out of the house, when this was waiting for them?.

Elenna had been searching for coconut, and there was a random guy selling coconuts in Cefalu, and I have her 20 Euros to buy some since I didn’t have change. He took the whole 20 and gave her a big handful of coconut pieces, but basically ripped her off because she was a kid and didn’t speak Italian. Since then, she wanted a whole coconut to drink the water fresh, but has been scared to approach people to buy things. So when we went on our walk and someone was selling whole coconut, we took advantage.

Elenna loved her coconut, but found out that she didn't really like coconut water.

Then we stopped at a sea side restaurant for a drink (we didn't think that Zanzibar was the best place to try borstcht).

Who knew there were Ukrainian restaurants in Zanzibar?

We finally got everyone out of the house to go do something - going to a cave to swim with sea turtles. We arranged for the trip with our driver, and headed over. In theory, this was going to be a good excursion because Lily’s favorite animal is a sea turtle and even Keira shouldn’t be afraid of sea turtles.

We got there and it was a pretty neat place. Basically, a hole in the ground opening up into a cave filled with water and sea turtles. The light coming in from above, combined with the water reflecting off of the cave walls made some cool colors ands shadows on the walls.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I was promised "swimming with turtles in a cave" but this was pretty neat.

When you buy the admission ticket, they asked if we wanted seaweed to feed the turtles. Not really sure how important it was, or how much they gave you, I asked for 5 (assuming that it was important). They then gave me 5 little baskets, about the size of the container that strawberries come in at the grocery store, and even though they were half full, it seemed like too much seaweed.

The stairs down into the cave were pretty steep and quite narrow, which made getting Liam down there a little bit of a process, but we all got there without incident. Everyone except for Keira quickly got into the water and started to feed the turtles.

Lily and Elenna got right into the cave.

It was a very cool experience. They are generally gentle creatures, and move leisurely through the water, so there really wasn’t the potential danger of the wild animal encounters we had had on our Kenyan safari.

Turtles aren't nearly as fearsome as most of the animals we saw on safari.

That said, Liam preferred to be held by Megan, and Keira watched from the deck.

Liam was a little shy at the beginning.

The one problem was, that since we were feeding them, the turtles would start to swarm you. And when 7 or 8 of anything that is about 1-2 feet long start to swarm you, even I got a little nervous at one point.

Although not fearsome, they would swarm you, if you were feeding them seaweed. A pretty cool experience until the turtle to human ratio went too high.

At one point, I watched a turtle swim up to me, and he seemed to be swimming straight for my knee. As I watched him, I thought to myself, “I wonder if this guy thinks my knee or leg hair is something he wants to eat?”, and then he proceeded to open his mouth and tried to bite me. Turtles don’t have teeth, and his mouth wasn’t coming at me in an angle where he could actually have bit me, but I jumped back and must have said something alarming, like “Don’t bite me!”

At this point, with my kids around me, I started to change my tone and act like it was playfully nipping at me, to avoid scaring them. And we continued on, but soon after, Elenna and Lily got out. It turns out that I didn’t do a great job of covering up being bitten. Also, Elenna later told me that she has some PTSD from snapping turtles in our lake, so she wasn’t of the view that turtles were harmless, and she didn’t like how they would swim around her and bump into her.

Liam found a good spot to sit and pet the turtles.

But we still couldn’t get Keira to come into the water. At the very end, we convinced her to come in, noting that she would never have a chance like this. So she did. And she enjoyed it.

Keira got to experience another "once in a lifetime" event.

For about 17 seconds, and then got out when multiple turtles started coming up to her.

Wild animals, even if not that wild, aren't Keira's thing.

DAY 49

In an attempt to get the kids out of the house again, we had our driver set up a boat ride on one of the wooden boats that dot the beach. As Disney people, we tend to put most things in the context of Disney, to the point where we would say “Wow, Disney really got the look of Animal Kingdom lodge right, the Emara hotel is very similar”, or “The safari in Animal Kingdom really got the clay walls, and the roads right, this safari is just like that ride.” We even would jokingly say “Can you believe that Venice started out as a movie set for Spiderman Far from Home?”

So it was no wonder that the first time we saw these wooden boats, we all immediately thought of the movie Moana. They were wooden hulls, with separate extensions on either side to improve balance. The sails were attached to what looked like a long tree branch, or maybe a tree sapling. Our second thought on seeing them was that we wanted a ride in them.

So the captain sailed up to our house and brought us into the water to his boat. The problem was that it was low tide and during low tide, the water stretches out for hundreds of yards and his boat was about 150 yards off of the shore, meaning that we would have to walk out there to get in. After our previous attempt to walk out there, we were all a bit nervous that we could do it. Compounding this, thinking that the boat would be easy to get to (in retrospect, I’m not sure why I thought this), Keira, Lily and I didn’t wear water shoes and when we got to the water’s edge, decided to press on without them. After all, the Captain wasn’t wearing them, and none of the locals that we had seen go out there, ever wore them.

The water was quite shallow and there were areas of white sand, but then areas of dark, which were seaweed/coral and potentially sea urchins. The guide said that we had to follow the path, and sure enough, through the dark areas, there were little paths of white sand that you could walk in. Liam was wearing water shoes, but I carried him anyway to reduce the potential for a mishap before the trip had even begun. That said, I now became worried that I would step on something and drop him into a patch of sea urchins, so my pace was slow.

The one thing about walking down the path, something that I didn’t realize until we got off and I was the last one in line heading back to the house, was that if you weren’t first, then the people in front of you stirred up some sand as you walked. And this compounded with every person in front of you, so that midway through our line, the path was clearly there, but it was no longer clear that there wasn’t a shell or something on it to step on.

We spotted a number of sea urchins on our walk, but they were generally easy to avoid, and we got to the boat without incident. We loaded up and were ready to go.

The boat ride was worth the perilous journey.

The Captain soon gave the controls over to Liam and me, and then Liam soon lost interest.

Captaining is hard work.

Keeping the boat going in the right direction required a bit of effort, and after about 20 minutes of sailing, I also lost some interest and handed controls back to the real captain.

There was a bar connecting the extensions at either side of the hull (I apologize for not knowing the technical term for these things), and at one point, the First Mate asked if anyone wanted to stand on it. Keira is usually the first one to jump on something like this, and didn’t hesitate to go up there. Then she sat down and put her feet in the water.

Keira had no qualms about walking out on the beam of a moving sailboat.

Lily went after and Megan did as well (but the camera ran out of batteries half way through the trip, to our dismay).

And neither did Lily.

We sailed out to the breakwater, but even there, there was a man standing, only waist deep in the water. That caused me to look into the boat - the hull was only about 3.5 feet deep, and even with 8 people on board, only went about 2-2.5 feet into the water. So basically, it was ideally suited for this shallow beach.

The boat wasn't very deep, making it ideal for the shallow waters.

At one point, we went out to the wide strectch of sandy water and got out of the boat and swam. Liam was upset because it was only about 2 feet deep and he wanted to swim, but the rest of us were just amazed at how clear and beautiful the water was (unfortunately, the camera was dead by now).

The water was stunningly beautiful.

On our way out, we saw a bunch of women bending over as if they were picking things from the ocean floor. The captain said that it was seaweed. On our way back, we got a closer look of where they were, and they basically were farming the seaweed - with stakes in teh ground and strings going from one stake to the next across the floor and seaweed growing along the strings.

After we got back, everyone except Lily (who had work to do), went to a restaurant for some lunch. Megan, Liam and I had actually walked and eaten here a couple of days earlier and Liam wanted to show his sisters because there were swings, a giant jenga game and a pool that we could swim in, that was about 3x the size of the pool at our house, but also about 10x dirtier, so only Megan would go in with him.

Liam loved "Lost Soles" and may not have even realized it was a restaurant.

The place was called “The Lost Soles” and they took the random flip flops that people left or washed up on shore and nailed them to the walls. They also wrote funny saing on the walls like “I have mixed drinks about feelings” or “Let the Evening Be Gin”. It was a great vibe and the food was also quite good. We are also big fans of any restaurants where the floor is sand. So we might have to bring Lily there.

The best bars give good advice.

DAY 50

I must confess that my posts don’t always go in order of what happened, and sometimes they combine various days. Most of the days that we are here, we are relaxing or in the case of Lily and Elenna, trying to get ahead on their work, so we don’t do a whole lot. Megan and I read for the most part. We try to trip plan, but because the internet is so slow/unreliable, only about 10% of the time are we successful in getting anything booked or confirmed, so we spend hours a day being frustrated with our computers.

Our kids generally read in their spare time. This is in part because they really enjoy reading, and in part because the internet is so slow, that it is painful trying to stream things. Liam is the lone exception, as someone who can’t read, he generally does stream stuff. Whether that’s because he doesn’t mind the endless pauses or because his device streams better, its not clear because he watches with his headphones on, to spare us having to listen to whatever Minecraft video he is watching. Although, he will often giggle to whatever is going on, and I do enjoy listening to that.

Most of us also do a good amount of schooling - Lily, Elenna and Liam directly, and the rest of us indirectly. Megan does Elenna’s lesson plans, and this means that every time she assigns a book for Elenna to read, she has to read it too, so she can ask questions, etc. I will help Liam with his reading and help Elenna with her math homework. I also usually will work in math problems into whatever game I play with Liam, either in the pool (if I capture him, I’d make him answer 3 questions to get out) or with cards - make him do the math whenever math is necessary. He has a math workbook too, but we rarely open it, because he is now about as good at math as Megan is. The only reason we open it from time to time, is to get him to write his numbers.

Its not immediately clear what Keira does. She was supposed to help Liam learn to read and to learn to swim (being a swim instructor at home, and often saying that she wants to be a teacher). Even if she did both things every day, that would only be 1 hour of her time, but since I teach Liam half the time, often has her days off. I don’t have instagram, and that was supposed to be her job, but from what I’m hearing, she doesn’t even do that. So I think that she spends her time reading bad romance novels.

We saw one of these things happen much more than the other.

So, one thing that I hadn’t written about was that we went out to dinner at a restaurant called “The Rock”, which not coincidentally was situated on a rock in the ocean. The only way to get out there was to take a boat, unless it was severely low tide.

Pretty neat spot for a restaurant.

Food was good, but a bit pricey, but it was more about the experience than the food. This was one of the few times that we were out at night, being driven there and back by our driver. It was interesting to see the little towns, most of which looked similar to Jambiani, where we were. There would be stretches of shops and such, followed by areas of nothing or hotels.

Once again is struck me how everywhere we went, there were a lot of people just walking down these stretches, as there were cars on the road, but clearly owning a car was not common. It wasn’t really clear where these people were coming from or going to, as it was probably at least a mile in either direction before anything of note would appear, and they were probably going farther. Often, these people would turn and try to flag down our van, but from my perspective did so at their own peril as there were no street lamps on these streets, and it felt to me like there was great danger that they would be hit by some driver. Luckily, that didn’t happen.

Another day we found a photographer to take our picture. We wanted to try to get family pictures taken wherever we could, and there is a website Megan used to find someone in Italy to take our pictures. In Zanzibar, the price was actually higher, but Megan randomly found someone on a Zanzibar message board, whose daughter went to photography school and was living in Zanzibar, so we got her number and she took our pictures for a much more reasonable price. We still haven’t seen the pictures yet, so I can’t post any here.

DAY 52

Megan and I continue to struggle as parents, wondering how we raised kids who don’t want to go outside or do anything. I fear that in 10 years, they will look back and complain to us that we didn’t drag them outside when they were in Tanzania to see more of the country. But for now, Lily says she has too much school work (but still knows real time what happens in her favorite shows and talks about books she has read, so I’m not sure what her concept of time entails), and Elenna and Keira don’t even have an excuse.

Our photographer seems to be dating a local guy who is in Move Zanzibar, a troupe that does gymnastics. She told us that they were performing at a local resort/restaurant, and then a few days later would be at a local rec center. So we decided to go see them at the resort, if for no other reason than to get the kids out of the house.

The one problem was that Elenna had been complaining that her stomach was not feeling well for a day or so, and then developed a low fever (99.4) in the afternoon. By the time we were ready to go, it had jumped to 103.5, so Megan stayed home with her while the rest of us went to dinner/the show. We had brought some medicine with us, but an hour in, the fever hadn’t come down, so Megan asked me to ask Haji if there was a doctor or hospital nearby if we needed one. Once again, the language barrier came up, and Haji thought I was asking to be taken to a hospital immediately, but eventually, we got through to him and he said to just call him if things got worse in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, Megan was able to talk to the pediatrician in the US and it seemed like Elenna was just “normal sick”, but we were told to look out for any additional symptoms.

Meanwhile, the dinner at the restaurant was a buffet and although Liam largely ate bread, the rest of us had a good selection to choose from. The show started out with some traditional African dancing. It went on for about 30 minutes, which was about 25 minutes longer than it needed to be in my view, since most of the dances looked exactly the same to me, and the music, although a good beat, also sounded pretty much the same. I could have used a little bit of explanation about what we were seeing and if the dances had a specific meaning, which would have been more interesting.

The acrobatic part was much more entertaining. The troupe had assembled two polls, and then they would take turns scaling them in all sorts of different ways and doing things that olympic gymnasts might be hard pressed to replicate. All very impressive.

I'm sure Megan was upset to learn that she missed seeing this many shirtless gymnasts.

Then they had two guys come out and basically, they did a contortionist performance - bending in all sorts of ways that the human body shouldn’t move. If you can picture the scene in the horror movie where the person gets possessed, and then bends upside down and starts walking on their hands and feet, that was pretty much it. Literally a bit difficult to watch at some points because you were afraid that the way they were turning, they might just split in half.

You probably need to zoom in a little to the top pic to see just how freaky what they were doing was.

When we got home, Elenna’s fever had dropped back to 99 degrees with the help of the medicine, and we all felt better about that. That is until about 1:30 in the morning when she started throwing up. The next morning, she started to feel a bit better, and by the next night she was eating some crackers and well on her way to full recouperation.

But with Elenna sick, the family’s default inertia continued and we didn’t really leave the house much. Megan and I continued to go for walks on the beach, but now even Liam wasn’t joining us. I did take him back to the store, because he was interested in going on the swings, so at least he hasn’t lost his ability to walk for long distances as long as there is a playground at the other end.

DAY 53

Once again, we did little, so Megan wanted to go to the community center to see “Move Zanzibar”, since she missed it earlier, and walking there would require that our kids actually leave the house, and see a little bit of the town. I was a little bit afraid of this, since I figured it would largely be the same performance that the 4 of us saw earlier, but since Elenna and Megan had missed it, and our kids needed to get out of the house, I was on board.

We walked through town, and again, the poverty was on full display. We walked past a number of houses that were missing roofs, or had partial walls, but it was clear that people were living in them. That said, everyone we passed seemed nice and happy. That was one of things that Megan kept commenting on, on our walks. That everyone here seemed happy - the pick up soccer games on the beach, the people who would say hi to us as we walked down the street. They may have had a lower standard of living, but it made us wonder if they had a higher quality of life.

Another thing that you would notice walking down the street (or the beach) is the number of people who carry things on their heads. Most people in the US (and in Zanzibar) carrying things would use their hands, so even seeing 1 person in a month would be notable, but you would probably see 2-3 people carrying a tray of cashews they were selling, or a basket of clothes, etc. on their heads as they walked, with their hands completely free. As someone with shoulder and back problems, this seemed to me like a poor way to carry something heavy, but apparently not. And I’ve been to enough college parties where I ended up trying to balance things on my head to wonder how many things had fallen down off of their heads before they got that good at carrying things that way.

But what is interesting is that Zanzibar was not the first place where I saw people doing this. They did this in Kenya as well. In fact, the first place on this trip that I saw people doing this was Istanbul, where a person was carrying a huge load of bread on his head in the city. So now I’m starting to wonder why people don’t do this more in the US.

But I digress. We got to the community center a few minutes after the show had started, and there were probably already 70 people there watching the performance, so we took the last few empty seats in the back. As I feared, it was pretty much exactly the same performance as before with 30 minutes of dancing followed by 30 minutes of acrobatics and contortionism. But it was still pretty darn impressive. That said, Liam, who curled up in my lap for half of the show at the resort, did the same thing this time. But Megan and Elenna were just as impressed with the acrobatics and climbing, and freaked out by the contortionism that the rest of us were.

I'm sparing you a picture of the contortionists in broad daylight.

We got home and the staff made us dinner. There were two cleaning people/cooks assigned to the house who were incredibly nice. It wasn’t really clear how much English they spoke - at first we thought that they spoke well, as every morning they asked, “How are you? (us “Good”…. How did you sleep? “good”… Did you sleep good? (yes we did) … You are welcome.” But then we realized that they asked us this EVERY day, and it didn’t vary based on our answers. Like with almost everyone else over the past two months, there were numerous times where we had to say things 4 times to be understood, or in the case of Megan and one of them about whether we wanted to close the door to the porch one night, it took Megan three times of saying that they could leave it open, and them asking if they should close it, before she just gave in and said that they could close it.

But they seemed to really like Elenna, so when Elenna got sick they were very worried and offered advice about how to get her better. One of them made a concoction of water, brown sugar and salt that likely would have been beneficial, but was undrinkable to Elenna, but very much appreciated by us.

But writing this reminded me of something that has come up a number of times in Africa. People will generally say “You’re welcome” a lot. Always in appropriate situations, but not quite. By this, I mean, a waiter might bring your plate to you and set it in front of you, and before you say anything, they say “You’re welcome” almost as if they are correcting your manners for not thanking them, but that was clearly not how they meant it - more like a "Here you go, I'm happy to give this to you". But often, I’d feel like an impolite jerk, who didn’t thank the person, when I didn’t have time to. I might be an impolite jerk, but not because I don’t say “thank you.”

DAY 54

We were coming down to the last day in Zanzibar, and Megan and I were increasingly worried that we were doing our kids a disservice by not making them go and explore more. The first several days of just sitting in the house were fine after about a month straight of going from place to place, but after that, it felt wrong somehow. So we were deciding between doing a tour of Stone Town or a snorkeling trip. Once we realized that Stone Town was 1.5 hours away (meaning any trip there would require 3 hours of car rides), the decision to snorkel was much easier. Meanwhile, Megan and I have been on spice/tea/coffee tours at other locations, and since we don’t drink tea or coffee the allure of those trips was pretty low

Lily said she had school work to do, and although she was quite anxious about not having enough time to go there and do her work and pack, we made her come. The car ride to the Blue Lagoon was basically going back to the Rock (so much for exploring new parts of the island), but then there was a 10 minute boat ride.

Our trip started off near the Rock.

The trip was arranged by Haji, and I asked if the boat would have snorkel gear, and Megan told me that was a weird thing to ask, because it was a snorkeling trip, and Haji said they had everything. So we went. After we finally tracked down the captain, and got into the boat, we found out that he did have snorkel gear, but he didn’t have lifejackets. So I was right to ask questions, but they were the wrong questions. Everyone in our family can swim, and Liam is pretty good for a 5 year old, so we pushed ahead.

We got to the snorkeling area and our kids were starting to complain. Lily is the only one of our kids who actually enjoys snorkeling, but since she was being forced to some on this trip, she refused to have any fun, no matter the cost. Keira once again appeared ill at ease with anything nature related, and Elenna continued to narrow down her list of animals that she actually likes. And yet for some reason, our kids say that they want to get scuba certified when we go to the Maldives, so I feel like that is going to be a lot of money and time wasted when they refuse to go into the water. But we will see.

Megan and I at least love being on boats, so the boat ride was probably the highlight of the trip. Any time you get to zip across water that color blue, its hard to be anything but happy. Liam meanwhile had been upset that we couldn’t go “swimming” on our last boat ride in the wooden dhows, because they let us get out where even he could stand. So this was a chance for him to swim.

Look at the color of that water.

When we got there, Liam gook one look at the water and decide that it was pretty deep (and it was) and was a little wary to get into the water. But we coaxed him in. I started out watching him while everyone else snorkeled. But I soon found that it was for some reason it was a little more difficult than I thought to keep him afloat. Liam was great swimming in the pool where he could stand in parts, or hold onto the sides, and I could stand and hold him. But since he was a little scared, he didn’t swim as much as he was able to, and I had to tread water and hold him up, which was a little more difficult with flippers and a face mask.

After about 5-10 minutes, our girls had decided that they had enough, which at least meant that Megan and I could snorkel for a little bit. Lily played with Liam a little in the water and they they all waited in the boat for us.

As far as the snorkeling, it was pretty good - there were a LOT of zebra fish right by the boat, and as Liam said, when I asked if he wanted to come back in and use his goggles to look at the fish, and he said he could see them from the boat.

There were lots of these fish.

Unfortunately, there weren’t any other cool animals - no turles or dolphins, etc. But Megan said that she saw some really cool rainbow fish with Elenna early on.

They enjoyed snorkeling (for a few minutes).

We headed back to the house so Lily and Elenna could do some schoolwork. Meanwhile, Keira, Liam and I went to the store to buy some Raman noodles (which we had been eating most of the time we cooked at home) for our last dinner, as we wanted to explore, but didn’t want to be sick on the plane.

Walking to and from the store was always interesting because you got to see some of the town. You got to walk past the houses and tiny stores. There were often goats or cows in the yards or walking across the street randomly. Megan and I marveled at how throughout Africa you would often see a 7 year old boy with a stick in his hand herding 25 sheep on the side of the road, for god knows how many hours. We wondered what would happen if we gave Liam a stick and 25 goats and had him walk them around our neighborhood.

After that, we felt like we should spend some money in the community, and went to a little area of shops near our house. We didn’t really want anything but Megan, Keira and Liam all got a little jewelry. I had seen a red #23 lakers jersey, which always made me laugh when I passed it because I assumed that the back probably said Michael Jordan on it (who was never on the Lakers), or it said LeBron James, but the Lakers never had that red color jersey. I wondered if they just sold their mis-prints to Africa, and if I should buy one because it would be amazing to wear in the US.

There was a shop that sold second hand clothes, and it appeared that a lot of the clothes had been donated from the US. I saw jersey that looked like it was from a P.A.L. little league on one boy. But the most interesting shirt we saw for sale at the store was a “Dopey Challenge” shirt, which is a shirt you earn if you run a 5K, 10k, half Marathon, and full marathon in successive days at the Disney World parks. Megan, Keira and Lily had done a 5k, 10k and 10M in one weekend, but a random fact that a I learned, as a person who lives with a Disney Family and follows the health insurance industry, the CFO of Cigna Health Group has run the Dopey Challenge.

I always thought Dopey was a good name for that chellenge.

We had a somewhat weird experience as we walked past one shop and a guy started swearing at us for not going in. I’m not sure where he learned his customer service tactics from, but he almost scared us into the place across the street where Megan bought a couple of dresses.

After that, we went back to the house. It was SOO hot on our walk that we jumped into the pool to cool off for a bit. After that, Megan and I went for a walk, and got a drink at Lost Soles as we took in our last views of that gorgeous water.

Lost soles was a mainstay.

Apparently, some cows had the same idea.

These cows were no fools.

When we were on our walk into town, Keira said that she wasn’t ready to leave Zanzibar - that sitting on the deck, reading a book and looking out on that water was probably the best thing we had done on this trip. It was hard to disagree with that, and it made us feel a little less guilty for not forcing them out of the house more - why go anywhere when you were already where you wanted to be?

It was hard to leave this.