As rough as yesterday should have been, it went relatively smooth. The whole awake-for-30-hours-thing confused me as to when my “day” ended and the next started in regard to my blog posting. In the end I decided sunup is the best marker. So with that:
I spent my morning from 3am to 6am at the DAR domestic terminal which was much nicer than I expected. There was a restaurant where I had some breakfast and relaxed until my final flight. As the sun was rising, I boarded my final flight from DAR to Mwanza. I was in and out of sleep, but I was never able to fully rest over, over the hour and a half flight. Thankfully during the three hour drive from the Mwanza airport to Shinyanga I was able to sleep. Driving around Mwanza a little bit, I was very surprised. It sits on the southeastern side of lake Victoria and has some beautiful and precarious topography. I’m bummed I didn’t explore it, but hopefully I can visit the city in the future.
Upon my arrival in Shinyanga, I spent 15 minutes at the office meeting the team and then went straight to the hotel to sleep. The weather here is very hot and my room was scorching, but thankfully they make use of that heat and the sun in the form of a solar powered AC unit. I sacked out instantly and slept from noon until 5pm.
I woke up for about two hours just to unpack, eat dinner and shower. I will say I had missed this Tanzanian cuisine! It’s not the healthiest and I definitely can’t be eating fried chicken and fries every day, but it’s become a comfort meal at this point. I’ve become pretty efficient at unpacking, and I’m fully settled in to the room. I think it’s going to be my home for the next 3 months; based on what I’ve experience so far, the hotel, my room and everything else are more than hospitable and for now there seems to be no reason to look into other options, especially because this one was one of the cheaper and closest ones to the office.
I slept in through my alarm this morning and was lucky to wake up naturally at 7am. I’m hoping I can get in the habit of waking up around 5am to run or exercise because the second to sun comes out, it gets uncomfortably hot. Today will be my first full day at the office, hopefully I don’t crash and burn due to my weird sleep schedule.