Monkeys!!!!

Yesterday we visited Jozania national park and even got to stay the night. It was beautiful and we got to see tons and tons of monkeys who are completely habituated to people, but aren’t fed by tourists and just kinda ignore you. We saw a mix of Sice and Red Colobus monkeys. Instead of talking about them, here’s just a ton of photos:

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First Impressions of Stonetown, Zanzibar

Where do I even begin? Each morning, everyone awakes to the sound of the call to prayer at around 5AM. It starts off quietly, as the first mosque, maybe a couple miles away, begins the prayer. Within a minute, more mosques join in (though each start at different times giving it the feeling of a song being spoken as a round) until every mosque on the island is flooding every street and house with the prayer. When it’s done, I go back to sleep.

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The Back of the Plane

I’m now just a little over 24 hours into this trip, not even in Zanzibar yet, and I’ve already met a handful of incredibly interesting people, the majority of which I am very sad to only have been able to know for such a short period of time, but isn’t that just the best and the worst part of traveling? I’ve also already had a few unexpected, and not particularly welcome, experiences that I feel warrant a blog post (and, after all, I did promise to blog more!). It all started just moments after boarding my 13 hour flight from Canada to Ethiopia.

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East Africa Pre-Travel Itinerary and a Lion Taking Out a Gazelle

In just a couple of days, I’ll be boarding a plane to East Africa for a month long vacation full of safaris, snorkeling, beaches, and giant tortoises! I usually have a lot of trouble keeping up with blogging while I’m traveling, so I’ve decided to get a head start on it with a pre-travel blog. No idea what I’m supposed to write in one of those, so here’s some exciting itinerary!

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Five Days in Jo’burg

Orlando West, Soweto, Johannesburg

When Leslie and I decided to spend two weeks vacationing in southern Africa we knew we wanted to split our time between Botswana and at least one other country. As college students, one of the deciding factors for us when we travel is cost and thus, when we figured out that we could fly to Johannesburg, South Africa for about $500 cheaper than pretty much any other country, our itinerary was decided for us.

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A Divided City

Derry

The focus of this semester has been the Northern Ireland conflict which, if you didn’t know, was (correct tense is debatable) a period of strife between Nationalists and Unionists during the 20th century. There are many differences between the two groups, but the foremost difference during the conflict was in regard to Home Rule (to what extent should Ireland/Northern Ireland should be a sovereign nation or remain under the control of Britain).

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