Taking Friday off work really made Sunday seem like a bonus holiday; it was great. I went running in the morning and saw the largest snail ever! Its shell was nearly the size of my fist and it must have been eight inches long. The shell looked like it belonged to a crab, not a snail and should have been in the water, not up on land far from moisture.
After a shower and breakfast it was time to do some laundry! I haven’t washed my skirts since I’ve been here (three weeks now!) and they smelled a little funky. We don’t have a washing machine and the nearest Laundromat is difficult to get to on a bike, so I washed my clothes one piece at a time in a bucket in our backyard and rinsed them in the outdoor sink. The soap they have here is called Omo and is really basic. It makes your hands feel very slimy, like the outer layer of skin is being dissolved away slowly. The packet even says to wash your hands well after using Omo. It takes a long time to wash your clothes by hand, even when you only have 3 skirts, one pair of shorts, 4 shirts, 3 pairs of underwear, and two towels.
I spent the rest of the morning finishing Les Miserables. It was really good and had a bittersweet ending. I would highly recommend it. In the afternoon Tanya and Jaclyn went to the pier to swim, but I got a bit sunburned from Paje on Saturday so I decided to stay out of the sun.
Zanzibar doesn’t have landfills for trash the way the US does. People either throw their trash on the side of the road or in empty plots of land (there’s garbage everywhere) or they burn it. Perhaps Sunday is the trash burning day because I could smell it inside the house and I saw smoke in the air when I checked on my clothes. Again, poor air quality.
We made homemade tortillas and a mexi-type dish for dinner which was really yummy.
After dinner we decided to watch one of the movies Tanya had on her computer. Sadly, the version of “The Tourist” that she got was in French with Arabic subtitles so we tried to watch “Burlesque” instead. There were two files to that movie and the first played fine but we couldn’t watch the end of the film because the second file wouldn’t play for some reason. Even though the movie wasn’t that good and I could guess exactly what happens, we were a bit disappointed that we couldn’t finish it. Perhaps the video store next to where we get water has it.