Websites

Here are a few websites that connect to a few of my blogs:

Las Vegas Shows http://www.vegas.com/ 

United Republic of Tanzania http://www.tanzania.go.tz/

While I was in Tanzania we were able to go on a safari.  One of them was at Ngorogoro Crater.  This site tells a little bit about safaris in Tanzania.

http://www.tanzaniasafarisafrica.com/

The Ranch

For spring break 2008 nine friends and I (including Analisa and Ebay) headed down to one of our  friend's (Paul's) parent's ranch in Northern California.  We went to an Easter church service Sunday morning then started the 17 hour drive.  Most of the drive was in the middle of the night through the middle of nowhere in Eastern Oregon.  We had trouble finding a gas station at 3 in the morning when we hadn't seen a town in hours and we became quite quick at bathroom stops in the middle of the road.  At one point in the drive we had a "herd" of wild mountain goats run across the road in front of us.  I believe we arrived about 6 in the morning and crashing for about 3 hours before starting our adventures on the ranch.

One day we got to shoot guns.  We set targets up across the creek and Paul's dad brought out a shot gun, a semi-automatic, and an elephant gun.  The elephant gun had huge shells.  They are the biggest you can buy and the gun kicked so hard we had to have someone stand behind us and brace us.

We went four wheeling along trails for hours.  One day he took us up the side of a mountain that still had snow on it and we were definitely swerving a little close to the edge of a sheer drop off for my liking.  We also did knife throwing, went on many hikes and enjoyed campfires.

My favorite part was the rafting.  There is a small river that runs through the ranch and the girls decided they wanted to go rafting.  The biggest rapids the river had were Class III so it was anything the guys were willing to wake up early for.  We went super early in the morning and it was really cold, so we wore wetsuits.  At the bottom of one rapid there was a tree down in the water and we hit it and our boat when up in the air.  It didn't flip over, one side of the raft went up the trunk so we were perpendicular with the water.  The girls on the bottom edge were in the water and one girl got swept away immediately.  Two of us were holding on to the other girl but eventually she slipped out too.  They were carried pretty far down stream before they were able to grab on to something.  We got the boat righted again but only had one paddle, as we had lost all the others.  The radio also got water logged so we couldn't call anyone. We ended up getting the raft to the other side of the river so we could beach it while we tried to get the others girls.  They were on the other side, so we positioned 

ourselves downstream to catch them once they let go.  The river carried them so fast they got past us before we were able to safely get them out of the water.  Now we had to get the raft back in the water, past obstacles we would potentially after to paddle around with one paddle and make it to our pick up point.  We did eventually make it there with half the people soaking wet in freezing cold weather.  The person who was picking us up said they were beginning to wonder about us once they saw all of our paddles, two shoes, and a vest go floating by.

This was an unreal spring break.  It was like being at summer camp but with all your close friends and you get to do whatever you want when you want to.  We had fun hunting frogs, playing with cool toys, like night vision goggles, and just hanging out in the in-ground hot tub.

Hujambo!

The little boy in the picture with me is Toshi.  He is the sweetest, most adorable boy ever and everyone wanted to take him home.  Recently I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Tanzania for a Janterm class.  Again I was privileged enough to travel with my friends Ebay and Analisa.  There is way too much to write about this experience to put in one post so I am just going to list a few things we did while we were in Tanzania.

The first day we were there we got to ride a camel.  That was pretty cool.  We went to a snake park and walked around the city a little bit.  The trip took us about 30 hours from the states and we were on an 11 hour time difference, so the first day our leaders were just trying to get us out about without throwing too much at us right away.

We came to Tanzania to learn about the people and the culture through service projects.  The program we were a part of is very different than every other Janterm trip Whitworth provides.  We were not taking a structured academic class while we were there.  The name of our program was Service in Tanzania.  We worked at orphanages, taught at schools, planted trees at churches, helped the Albino population and lived with two different host families for over a third of the trip.

One of the Pastors we worked with taught us a song.  His gift to us, something we could take home with us and share with others.  He taught it to us in Kiswahili and we sang it before the ground breaking for planting the precious trees.

The best part of the trip for me was the home stays.  I feel like that is where I really learned about the people and the culture.  You learn so much about someone when you live their life with them.  No outside influences, just strictly doing what they do everyday.  I will never forget washing dishes by hand for hours in buckets of dirty water, going to the bathroom in a hole, walking to a well and hauling water so that we could wash laundry, one piece at a time, milking the cow so we would have milk for tea in the morning, and starting dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon but never eating before 9:30 because that is just how long it takes to make dinner every night.

Everywhere we went we crammed in as many people as possible, were extremely happy, and were always singing,

Tanzania is beautiful and so are the people. I love these people. I miss Tanzania.  It is so important that we take the time to learn about other people's lives and culture.  I am honored

 that these people shared their life with me.  I have too much to say and so many great pictures so to end this post I am going to share a few of these precious pictures.

"V" for Vegas!

One day while I was in my room, my two friends, Ebay and Analisa, came in to hang out.  We started talking about spring break and our lack of plans. We decided we would like to go somewhere warm.  Immediately we all got out our computers and started searching for plane tickets to Hawaii :) Obviously this was too expensive.  Analisa began looking at packages for Las Vegas.  We couldn't believe the prices she found.  Right then we decided the three of us were going to go to Vegas for spring break.  We booked five nights at The Flamingo, right on the strip.

We were flying out of Seattle so we spent the previous night at Analisa's house on the West side.  We had to leave at 4 am to make it to the airport so we went to bed about 11 pm.  Around midnight we were woken up when Ebay became very sick.  None of us ended up getting any sleep and we spent the majority of the wee hours of the morning in the bathroom.  Ebay was bound and determined to make it to Vegas whether she was sick or not, so we loaded into the car at 4 am after a long night.  After making it through security we found Ebay some water and she feebly curled up on a chair waiting to board.  On the plane I was in the middle seat with Ebay on the aisle so she was close to the bathroom.  We gave her some Nyquil to knock her out for the plane ride.  Right as we were taking off Analisa loo

ks over at me and says, "I don't feel very well." As soon as we were in the air Analisa started puking.  

We had quite the trip just making it to Vegas.  We had two 2 hour long flights with a three hour lay-over in-between, then a shuttle ride to our hotel.  Being the healthy one, I made sure we had plenty of barf bags in our seats, my tray table was filled with Ginger Ale and I was constantly rubbing someone's back.  As soon as we made it to the hotel the girls collapsed into the beds and fell asleep.  It was 3 pm and I didn't know what to do with myself.  They had both chosen different beds so my first decision was which sicky I wanted to lay with.  

The next morning they were both raring to go, but I was exhausted not having gone to bed the previous day at 3 in the afternoon like they had.  We were not sure if they got sick from food poisoning or the flu.  I was worried.  I ended up getting sick the following Wednesday but it was just a 24 hour bug.  Friday was our last day in Vegas and we were all finally feeling about 100%.

We had a blast in Vegas.  The pool was the main reason we had chosen The Flamingo to began with so we were definitely laying out everyday.  We walked around a lot of the fabulous hotels, went up the Eiffel Tower, we went to the Pirate show outside of Treasure Island, we watched numerous fountain shows (We love

 water shows!) and we went out for a very nice dinner our last night at a steak place called Joe's.