September 4th, 2011

On Sunday we were finally able to move into our new house! I was originally told that Kelly and I would be living in a two bedroom apartment, but as it turns out the apartment was actually a house. It’s actually really nice. The front window has a view of Mt. Meru!

the view off our front porch

Our neighbors are the primary and secondary principals on one side.

And the other girls on the other side.

The kitchen and the living room are open to each other and it came with all of the furniture (couch, chairs, coffee table, bookshelves, dining table, mini fridge (ours is as big as it gets here. The power can’t handle American sized fridges) and gas stove/electric oven)

Our rooms are enormous in my opinion, much bigger than both my JMU apartment room and my room in Richmond. The room comes supplied with an armoire, a desk, and a bed. The bed for some reason is like a single and seems miniscule in the room. The bed is smaller than both my double at JMU and my day bed at home (which you wouldn’t think would be possible but this bed is considerably shorter) I put up my photo collage!

I love the view out my bedroom window!

The bathroom is very basic toilet, sink, shower head. (I like this shower much better than that strange bath tub with a showerhead and no curtain thing they had going in Berlin.) No storage though.

The house is fabulous! …but there are a few downsides….the floor is straight up concrete, complete with scuffs and paint marks. Also, the dust here comes in and coats it so when you walk across it you get the weird walking on a chalkboard feeling. Our poor maid Gudilla (not how you spell her name) has to mop it everyday.

It was looking pretty bland and the lack of decoration was kinda freaking me out when we first moved in. It took them about a week to give us couch cushions. (Made of some industrial foam stuff that is a very solid rectangle. It does not cushion at all when you sit. It’s the same stuff they choose to make mattresses out of here, haha. But pure exhaustion will make any mattress feel good…)

The other weekend Kelly and I set off to the used market to buy some furnishings. I think this market is called Matumba or Matoomba or at least that is how it’s said. It’s this big row of people selling anything from clothes (some cute ones and good deals) to curtains, bedsheets and shoes.

Our trusty cab driver, Jimmy took us and helped us bargain. Not that Kelly needs help bargaining, she’s much more assertive than I am when it comes to that. We ended up getting:

a gorgeous curtain panel in chocolate brown for the living room. I ended up paying 20,000 shillings for it or 12$. It needed a few alterations and I hung it up that same day.

Bathmats and a shower curtain for the bathroom. A set of three bath mats came to 15,000 shillings or 9$. The curtain Kelly got for 10,000 shillings or 6$ because she bargained the poor man to death. It is a super good curtain from Target that is worth 30$ new. (I know this because I had the same curtain only a different color scheme in my college bathroom) Gudilla washed the mats for us before we set them out.

For my room I picked up a beautiful woven rug that cost me about 20$. Which actually was a rip-off, I should have gotten it for half that price. But they saw the color of my skin and read sucker…and Jimmy wasn’t there at that point. But now we know.

I also got a purple bedsheet for about $3.50 that I cut in half and strung it on my curtain rod in my room. Sometimes the askari’s (the school’s guards) like to creep around back there and I needed a curtain for when I got dressed or changed. It’s looking a lot better now and I feel like I’m finally settling in.

I will definitely feel settled in once I plant some stuff out front. Right now it's all depressing dirt...