Almost into single digits...

Wiki Kumi na Moja. (week eleven - 10 days and counting) The end could not come any slower...and yet there are parts of me which really are not ready to go. It will be here before I know it, regardless of how I feel. Tanzania and I are just about maxed out on one another...I've had too much fun and it may only be downhill from here. I am however choosing the take an optimistic view of next Thursday (midnight is my 21st birthday and our last night in Tanzania) - its gonna go down.

This past week was a long one...too many nights in town. Mama teases me that I've become a real resident (and teases Kelley when I'm out that "I know when Lily has been drinking kidogo (little) because she ongea sana (talks a lot)" haha - NOT TRUE!). With only two weeks left in Arusha I couldnt help myself - only gonna be in Tanzania at this age once. Some of us stayed out all night Thursday booking rooms at a hostel downtown (25,000 for a triple room aka $6 each). The rooms were what you would expect for $6.00 a person, but my god that shower was glorious. My first real, hard pressure, burning hot water from an over head tap shower in - 10 weeks. ASANTE MUNGU. Friday morning we all headed out of Arusha and up to Ngorongoro Crater to do THE most touristy thing in Tanzania - to see the animals!

The Ngorongoro Crater was not created by a meteor (contrary to my assumptions about what the word crater means) but was apparently a gigantic volcano which collapsed. Considering how big the diameter of this crater is - must have been a pretty damn big volcano. You have to drive up and over the ring of mountains around the crater (terrifying because these are tiny dirt roads on cliff edges with no railings - and in the morning the fog was so thick that what looked like a wall of white 5 feet away from the car window turned out to be a spectacular cliff view of the whole crater) but once down inside the crater there is every kind of African animal you can ask for. I even saw lions for the first time in three visits to Africa - but the jerks were all sleeping. Whatever, I'm over it.

I've spent a lot of time in the last three months here in Tanzania reevaluating what can only be titled "My Five Year (to life span) Plan." Over the past few years I've learned about myself that I'm the kind of person who has big aspirations and likes to make big plans...but inevitably always changes them last minute. I was gonna go to Art School....but decided to go to Iowa two months before class started. I was gonna take a year off and volunteer abroad...but decided to live in a sorority house. I was gonna go to South Padre for spring break...and wound up in Spain for one crazy week. I was gonna go home for the first summer in three years...and found myself buying a plane ticket to Africa two weeks before peacing out of the country. So this summer has given me the opportunity to do some serious thinking (aka I'm graduating in nine months so I need to get my shit together!) All I know for sure is that I'm gonna need some serious time between next summer and graduate school - YES I will be going to graduate school (I think). Anyone interested on A. running away to Europe for a few weeks next fall or B. having an awesome adventure driving a big loop around America and putting ourselves in outrageous situations? I'm down - even if I'm going alone.