Merry Christmas!

Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays! I went to Newala on the 23rd to meet up with Katie and then we went to Ndanda the morning of the 24th to meet up with 9 other PCVs for holiday festivities. We went again to the watering hole for a nice swim and ended the day at a restaraunt for some basic Tanzanian fare and beers. We began Christmas morning by cooking a fabulous breakfast feast. We had eggs scrambled with lots of veggies, sausage (made by local nuns), and Katie and I even channeled our southern-ness (she's from Oklahoma) and cooked up some rockin' biscuits and sausage gravy. After brunch we did a gift swap...the theme was ridiculous stuff you can buy in Tanzania and we each had a 3000 shilingi (~2 USD). It was a lot of fun and the gifts ranged from a Hannah Montana CD case to a bottle of ranch dressing and CD of porn (there was a lot of regifting from care packages). I think I ended up with the best present of all...a 4-pack of Starbucks double shot espresso drinks. I even got to drink them chilled, courtesy of Dylan's fridge! We spent the rest of the day just relaxing, puzzling and playing scrabble, drinking bucket wine and cooking. For dinner we made beef fajitas that also turned out to be pretty tasty, and ended the night playing charades. All in all a very nice Christmas.

On the morning of the 26th me, Katie, Ghee, Grant, Jeff, and Jose hopped on a bus to Lindi and then went onwards to an island village called Kilwa Kisiwani, a UNESCO World Heritage site for its 9th century ruins. On the 27th we took a little sailboat over to see the ruins, which were pretty neat, and then spent the afternoon at the beach. The beach was really nice and I can now cross 'playing Marco Polo in the Indian Ocean' off my bucket list. Ice cold beers at a safi hotel bar on the beach ended out the vacation nicely. Katie, Ghee and I headed back to Lindi this morning (the others went on to the next stop of their trip) and we're spending the day here in an air-conditioned internet cafe, tonight in an Anglican church, and tomorrow we'll head back to Katie's site in Newala to spend New Years. I'm  just about out of computer time, so that's all for now, hopefully pictures later. Hope you all have a fun New Years!