A heatwave in Lithuania

One week ago I arrived in Kaunas to attend a summer course in Lithuanian Language and Culture and I must say it's horrible in Kaunas at the moment. Don't get me wrong, I'm only talking about the weather now. They say that in Lithuania they have only two hot days per year. Well, so far I have experienced seven of them. There is a massive heatwave going on here, with temperatures rising to 32 degrees outside, not to mention the temperatures inside the dorm I am staying in. And since we are in Lithuania, normally a cold country, there is no airconditioning in my dormitory.

So how am I doing here? Next to learning the Lithuanian language, I am keeping myself busy with meeting Lithuanian friends, having a good time my fellow students and visiting touristic places. This weekend I was in Trakai and Vilnius. Last year I was exactly at the same places, but at that time it was raining. This year, in the sun, Trakai is even more beautiful:

I heard a surprisingly large amount of Dutch tourists there as well and in the plane to Kaunas I was also sitting next to a Dutch family that was going on holiday to Lithuanian coast. It seems that this wonderful country is becoming more and more of a tourist destination, which brings joy to my Lithuania-loving heart.

As mentioned above, I'm also meeting up with Lithuanian friends. This is not as easy as it sounds like though. I have found out that Lithuanians don't really like to plan anything. Where in Holland it's sometimes common to plan a meetup between friends one month in advance, here it's very rare that a meetup is planned more than two days in advance. When you ask a Lithuanian to meet you somwhere in the next week, the answer will most likely be: "I don't know what I'll be doing yet around that time. Just ask me later, ok?"
I wonder where this reluctance to plan anything is coming from. Is it a remainder from the Soviet times, where people didn't need to plan anything because the government would plan everything for them? Or is there some other reason for this, well-hidden in the heart of Lithuanian culture? I must say that I don't know yet. I guess first I will need to meet more Lithuanians and question them about their behaviour.

Ok, so it's way too warm here to sit inside and write a blog. Now I will go and prepare myself for a trip to a lake near Kaunas, where I will hopefully be able to cool down a little bit. See you! :)

A tribute to my green shoes

A little more than one year ago I needed new shoes. As a real man I would never be able to pick out a fashionable pair of shoes by myself, so I invited a female colleague to come with me to help pick the right pair of shoes. She was flattered to become my personal fashion advisor and one evening after work we went to the shopping mall together to find me those ideal shoes. We had visited some cheaper stores already with no success when we entered a store with the more expensive brands. Without a doubt my fashion advisor chose a pair of green Skechers. These would be the perfect shoes for me, she said. I liked the shoes and tried them on, but wasn't sure about the bright colors. Moreover, I was not used to buying shoes that cost more than 40 euros at that time, so I said I'd think about it and went home without buying any shoes. In the days that followed I couldn't stop thinking about these shoes though, so a few days later I went back to the store and bought the green shoes.

That proved to be a very good decision. For the first time in my life my friends complimented me on my shoes, pretty girls on the street didn't look away any more after checking me out from top to toe and also the shoes were also really comfortable. In the months after that me and my shoes were inseparable. Together we travelled all over the world. We had walked around in no less than 15 different countries until they let me down for the first time on a rainy day in Macedonia: their laces broke. At that time I realised that my shoes were getting old and that maybe it was time for them to retire.

I decided to give them one last honor by taking them with me on my trip to Africa. In Tanzania my good old green shoes were functioning as working shoes. As it was a bit muddy there sometimes, the shoes were dirty by the end of the second week and I would probably never be able to wear them again under normal circumstances. I was considering throwing them away to have a less heavy backpack for the rest of my journey.

At the last day of the workcamp I was ready to take one last picture of them to say goodbye, but I hesitated. How could I throw away these shoes that had been so loyal to me on all my travels? I thought about all the memories we had shared together. A tear was rolling down my cheek while I was standing there with my camera in my hand. 
"No, I won't leave these shoes behind," I said to myself. I will take this picture, post it on my blog and then I will write a tribute to my green shoes to thank them for what they've done for me. Because a pair of shoes can actually change your life.

Just ask Cinderella.

Trip to Africa

Yesterday I came back from my trip to Tanzania and Kenya. Obviously I have had a lot of new experiences during my travel. Since I think that many of you will be interested to hear detailed stories, this will be quite a big blog post. For those of you that are too lazy to read the whole post, I have posted a short list of the things I have done during my trip at the end of this post so you can still know what I did without having to read the whole story.

Karibu Tanzania

My first contact with a Tanzanian was a pleasant one. After watching a game from Euro 2012 at Cairo International Airport, where I had to transfer in order to get to Tanzania, I was waiting in line for the security check that was required in order to be allowed to enter the waiting room for the flight to Dar es Salaam. The guy in front of me, a dark-skinned young man, turned around and asked me how I was doing. A nice conversation followed and even though we got seperated after the security check, he later came sitting next to me again in the waiting room to continue the conversation.

I found this to be typical for Tanzanian cukture. It's not for nothing that the first word that I learned in Swahili was "karibu", which means "welcome". Everywhere I went people came up to me, looking for a talk with a "mzungu", the Swahili word for a white person. Sometimes this did pose a problem though. It was difficult to tell which people were genuinely interested in you and which people were just trying to sell you something. In other countries it's easy to send away those annoying salesmen on the streets with a simple "no, thank you", but how do you send away a friendly guy who has just been talking to you for 5 minutes when he starts showing you his Masai paintings?

The volunteer work I was going to do in Tanzania, building a goat shed to make money for vulnerable individuals in the regions such as widows, orphans and the HIV-infected, didn't start on the first day. We would first spend a few days at the ranch of Uvikiuta (the Tanzanian volunteering organisation that I was with) in a quiet suburb of Dar es Salaam. This area looked just like a 5 stars beach resort, the only exceptions being that there was no beach nearby and that the accomodation was not worth 5 stars (toilets were outside and the shower, which was in the same room as the toilet, was just a bucket of cold water). We shared the ranch with some velvet monkeys. These monkeys were not shy at all: some of them even joined us for lunch and to show that the friendship was mutual I went to visit them to take a few pictures while they were sitting on the grass. This didn't end well though: after taking some nice pictures I got overconfident and came too close to the monkeys, which resulted in me being attacked by two angry monkeys. The other volunteers that were there said this looked very funny (can you imagine: me running away, being chased by two screaming monkeys), but unfortunately none of them took a picture of the attack. This is a picture of just before the assault took place though, you can just see the monkey thinking "ok, that's enough, now I'm coming after you!":

Moving to the Kilimanjaro-region

Monday was a day with just preperation trainings and a short trip to the city. We went to bed early, because on Tuesday we had to get up at 3:30 am in order to catch a bus to the campsite in the area around Mount Kilimanjaro: the highest mountain in Africa. The bus station was about 1 hour away from where we were staying and the place is totally insane. I had never before seen so many buses at one place in my life. The buses were parked everywhere without a logical order and moreover there were no signs to guide you to the right bus: a lost foreigner would have to rely solely on the many people that were shouting the names of Tanzanian cities in an attempt to get people to go with their bus. It's a good thing that there were people from the volunteer organisation who could show us foreigners the way. To give you a numerical indication of how busy the bus station was: at 6 am in the morning it took us about 30 minutes just to get from the place where our bus was parked to the main road. I couldn't imagine having to travel like this every day or even week.

The camp took place in a small village near Mwika on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Due to the fact that this village was at an altitude of 1700 meters above sea-level and the fact that it was winter in Tanzania, the temperature here was very nice with around 20-25 degrees by day. We were staying in a house in the middle of the green jungle. There was another volunteer project going on in this village and we would stay together with the volunteers from this other project throughout our entire stay. In total we were staying in the house with 18 people: 10 Tanzanians, 3 South Koreans and 1 volunteer from France, Scotland, Hong Kong and Germany plus of course me from the Netherlands. Half of the volunteers was working on the other project (painting the walls of a school) and the other half was working with me on the goat shed. We were going to build the shed from the ground up: on the first day we would have to cut down all plants and trees on an area of 4 by 2.5 meters in the tropical forest to make room for the shed and in order to make poles marking the corners of the shed we needed to cut down some more trees at another location before we could actually start with the construction of the actual shed.

In the afternoons and weekends we were busy as well. One day we visited a woman named Mama Lucy who showed us how to turn coffee beans that came straight from the coffee plant into actual coffee in just one hour. Even though I don't like coffee, I tried half a cup and I must say that the taste was very good. Furthermore, we visited the waterfalls close to Marangu, did a mini-safari in a park close to the border with Kenya where we saw elephants in the wild, went to Moshi (the nearest big city) for internet and other things and visited the local market in Mwika:

Doing things the African way

On Saturday I had two typical African experiences in a row. After having visited the waterfalls near Marangu, we took a "dalla dalla" (= a Tanzanian minibus) to Moshi and then another one to get back home. We already knew that these buses are usually overcrowded, but the amount of people in the bus on the way back was just surrealistic. The door couldn't even close any more and no less than four people were hanging out of this open door when the bus was driving:

The trip from Moshi to Mwika lasts about 45 minutes without interruptions. In a dalla dalla however you need to be prepared for a long trip. The minibus drives slow (although at some times dangerously fast as well) and stops all the time to let more people get on the bus. And if there are empty seats (or standing places) in a bigger village, the driver will just wait until the bus is full. In total the trip back to Mwika lasted more than 2 hours. The place we were staying in was about 30 minutes away from Mwika on foot. There is one alternative though for lazy people that don't feel like walking: you can also go up the mountain by "piki piki" (= some kind of cross-motorbike). That evening we tried out the piki piki. The ride was not quite comfortable nor safe. There were no helmets or anything, two passengers plus one driver on a small bike and the driver was driving way too fast on the paved road. I didn't want to think about what would happen if the motorbike would crash. Thankfully we quickly reached the unpaved road and the driver had to slow down. The speed was still too high for the bumpy roads though: at times I was lifted as much as 20 centimeters off my seat. But at least I can cross "riding on the back of a piki piki" off my to do list.

The children

Even though we had a full program every day, we still had some free time left around the house. The first few days I was lazy most of the time, still recovering from the lack of sleep earlier that week, but the second week was more active. The local children had discovered us and came buy every day to ask for lollipops, admire our electronical devices and play football with us. It was really adorable how some of the children learnt my name so quickly and were even asking for me when I was doing something else inside the house. One of my favourite kids was a boy that I'd like to call "Little Georgie". At some point I was taking pictures of the children and saw him looking at me with my camera with great interest, so I showed him how the camera worked. He then asked if he could borrow my camera and started taking pictures of everything: his friends, me, the other volunteers, the house... And the kid has talent for sure! Some of the pictures that I put on Facebook were actually taken by this little fellow.

Then for the more serious part of my travel. As mentioned in my previous blog post, the project was also about meeting vulnerable individuals in the region. In the second week we were visiting an HIV-positive widow and mother of three children. Due to a nasty-looking infection on her hand this lady was unable to go to the market and sell products, so she had to rely just on gifts from friends and family and the food she could get from her own land. When one of us asked about her plans for the future, the young woman started to cry and said that she just didn't know what to do. I knew situations like this existed, but it was very confronting to actually meet this woman that was slowly dying with her young children that were going to be orphans in a few years from now.

Moving to Nairobi

The end of the workcamp was already approaching now. On Thursday we finished the shed; on Friday we just had an evaluation of the two weeks and time to pack our bags and play with the children for the last time. Then on Saturday it was time to leave. The majority of the group left for Dar es Salaam early in the morning, but since my flight home would leave from Nairobi I could not join them. Instead, I was heading for Arusha that day: a big city in Northern Tanzania from where I would catch the bus to Nairobi. I didn't have to make this travel alone. I was joined by Liz from South Korea and two local volunteers. The four of us had a lovely day in Arusha. We walked around the city, drank fresh juices in local bars and talked a lot. Since there is not that much to see inside the city and the city is known for the huge amount of people that bother tourists on the street trying to sell them something, it was very nice to be there with some Tanzanians. So once again thanks a lot to Baraka and Brenda for joining us and making our day in Arusha so great!

After our Tanzanian friends had left, I went out for some food with Liz. After failing to find a pizza place that should have been nearby, we decided to eat something in a restaurant opposite to the guesthouse that we were staying in. However, just when our food was served, we found out that the owner was trying to rip us off by charging more than twice the price that we agreed initially for our food. We obviously didn't accept this and left the restaurant immediately when he only offered us a small discount on his increased price. A few minutes later we bought better food on the street for a lower price. We then sat down in a local bar to have a beer and enjoy our food. We were having a pleasant conversation when suddenly the owner of the restaurant showed up with some konyagi, a Tanzanian drink that is a bit similar to vodka, in his hand. He was clearly a bit tipsy already and wanted to talk about what happened earlier that evening. We were able to send the conversation in a different direction soon and in fact we even went to a nightclub together after Liz and I had finished our beers and food. It still felt a bit uncomfortable to hang out with this guy though, so we didn't stay long at this nightclub and left the restaurant owner alone again.

The next morning we got on the bus to Nairobi. The bus ride was a memorable one: I was driving through the desert-like landscape of Africa, saw some shepherds with their flocks, was sitting next to two Masai people and crossed a land border in Africa. Crossing this border was more easy than expected. The bus just drops you off at one side of the border, you go inside some office to get your exit stamp, walk through a gate past a sign that says "You are now entering Kenya", get in line to buy a Kenyan visa, talk to a local and find out that you can in fact stand in the shorter line as well, fill in a form, convince the lady behind the counter that you really only need a transit visa instead of the more expensive regular one, wait for a few minutes, get your visa and walk back to the bus while shaking off a man that tries to convince you that you need to pay an extra fee of 50 US$ to enter Kenya through this border, receive a present from the random Tanzanian guy that you talked to at the visa office and you're done! This may sound complicated, but I really felt more comfortable than I expected at this border crossing and all of this took less than 30 minutes.

Life in Nairobi

When we arrived in Nairobi after a 6 our bus-ride we were both hungry and needed to go to the bathroom, so Liz proposed that we would go to a restaurant quickly and would change money later. We ordered some food and went to the bathroom and Liz asked me to go change money after that. The only problem was that it was a Sunday and all exchange offices that I was pointed to by people on the street were closed. In the end I found a Zimbabwean guy who took me by the hand and walked to a few offices, but all of them were closed as well, after which he pointed me to a man that was from the black market. If I would have been asked to draw a picture of a "shady guy", I would have drawn a picture that looked exactly like this guy: a hat, a long beige jacket and quick moving eyes. I had no other option than to follow him, but when he entered a building and wanted to go with me into a dark building I had enough and said to him that I would go to an ATM and just change my dollars at some other time. When I went outside, I met the Zimbabwean man again, who then showed me to an exchange office that was open on Sunday, so in the end it all turned out fine, but I now know better than to expect to change money on a Sunday again.

After the food, I said goodbye to Liz and went to my hostel. In the evening we went to watch the final of Euro 2012 with a group of men from Australia, Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya somewhere in a tent. It was really interesting to watch the game in an African environment. In the Netherlands when watching a game in a bar you just hear a disappointed "uhh" or "ahh" after a missed chance, but in Africa that's a bit different. The people there really go wild after any exciting moment, making sounds that I can really not reproduce on this blog using the standard alphabet. But the game was good and it was a very successful evening.

In Nairobi I also met up with friends again. I had a really great time with Caroline (and later also her friend Concepta) on my first full day and with Gladys on the second day. On the second day I also went to a National Park. Safaris in Tanzania were too expensive, but the ones in Kenya would be kind of affordable. The lady behind the counter wanted to help me a bit too much though. She said I could choose between a safari walk for 20 US$ and a real safari including car for 90 US$. She said that I would see the same animals in both safaris, with exception of the giraffes and elephants. As an economist, I was obviously tempted to choose the cheaper safari walk. This was a bad decision though. It turned out that the safari walk was outside the National Park and also it was more like a zoo. I didn't have the time to do the real safari after my visit to this zoo because I would meet a friend in the afternoon, so in the end I felt bad about not having done a real safari. But still, I saw all animals in the safari walk and took some nice pictures of them. And I hope to go back to Africa when I'm old and (hopefully) rich, so I can do a real safari then.

Final words

After all, my trip to Africa has been full of new experiences for me. I did so many things I would have never been able to do in the Netherlands, met so many wonderful people and actually meant something for the local community in that small village on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Moreover, I feel I have acted as an ambassador of my country (as most people in Africa had never met a Dutch person before) and left a good impression of me and my country on basically all people I have met. Travelling outside of Europe is a great way to broaden your horizons and actually learn something from cultures that are very different to your own. I certainly hope to travel a lot more outside of Europe in the future. Maybe next year I will go to Asia or something. But for now, all the travelling that I've done in the past few months has been enough. After my summerschool in Lithuania and maybe a short trip back to Prague I will be done for this year. It will be difficult to fill up this blog the coming months without travelling stories, but I'm sure I'll find a way.

As promised, I will end this blog post with a list of the amazing things I have done in Africa:
- Rode in the back of a pick up truck with 6 others including luggage
- Rode in a "dalla dalla" African style: overcrowded and way too fast
- Eaten sugar straight from the sugar plant
- Eaten fresh passion fruits and avocados (delicious!)
- Eaten food cooked by a real African "mama" every day for two weeks
- Rode on the back of a "piki piki"
- Seen elephants in the wild
- Bought booze for a drunk restaurant owner
- Sat next to two Masai people (including big holes in their ears) on the bus to Nairobi
- Walked among the wild animals on a walking safari
- Had dinner with some strangers that I met on the bus on my way to the airport