New Apartment!

Greetings from our new apartment! A couple of days ago, we moved into our first permanent housing since we moved out of our house in Tacoma almost a month ago. For our first few weeks in Zanzibar, we were living in a large apartment in the top floor of a building with a shop and four other apartments. To get to our apartment, we needed to go through the shop, up a ladder to another family’s apartment, through their kitchen, and up some other ladder stairs to our apartment. The family was nice and our apartment was nice, but it was hard not to have more of our own private space to retreat after and during a day of trying to navigate a new city where we don’t speak the language well.

Our new apartment, although smaller (around 800 square feet), is very private and has lots of luxuries that we’re enjoying anew, like hot showers and air conditioning. We still need to boil the water for washing dishes and we use bottled water for drinking and brushing teeth, but we feel a lot cleaner. We also appreciate our four-burner electric stove, with oven. Most families here use single kerosene burners or charcoal to cook. The family whose kitchen we needed to walk through at our old apartment cooked an amazing variety of samosas and chapattis on their charcoal burner, but, as in most places in Zanzibar, there was a lot of smoke and ash floating around. The four-burner stove here means that we can cook more complicated food more easily, and there’s less dust and smoke to make the house dirty.

The other perk at the new apartment is a rooftop veranda with a WASHING MACHINE, the first we’ve seen here in Zanzibar. We and most other people were washing our clothes by hand at the old place. After wringing clothes by hand, we found ourselves longing for late 19^th-century inventions like the washing board and the wringer. At the new apartment, we still hang our clothes out to dry, but the washing machine is pretty exciting.

Here are pictures of our new place—note the traditional carved Zanzibarian furniture, mosquito nets, and terrazzo floors!