Africa's full of surprises!

It occurred to me while I was laying in bed last night that I haven't really talked about how different it is here than what I expected. So here goes nothing: Contrary to popular belief, we are able to get hot water for showers. Sometimes the water pressure cuts out, or the water is actually scalding hot, but I guess I shouldn't be complaining :) The land is not too dry and open as you'd see on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel. It's actually full of hills/mountains and it's green for the time being until about 2 more weeks. We're currently in the dry season. Going off of the last point, it is dry season, and it is winter here! Yes, it is cold. It gets down into the 40's and 50's at night, and usually it doesn't start to warm up til around noon. It probably gets to be in the 80's at the highest. There are no napkins, which kills me. Mom would be proud to know that I hate wiping my greasy fingers on my pants! There aren't really trashcans anywhere, but we do have them at camp. The trash gets thrown into a huge ditch and then it is burned once the pile gets big enough. People like to keep their yards nice and clean. This involves sweeping... but sweeping off the dirt. And they don't use brooms, it's more like some branches from a bush. Dogs are never really explained as pets. They are there for protection, but I can see that some people would be hurt if something happened to their dog. For this reason, I will still call them pets. As for cats, I haven't met many people that like them. There is one main road that goes through each of the towns. All of the other roads that lead to people's houses are dirt roads. Needless to say it gets very dusty when we go anywhere and our windows are open. We do laundry by hand, which I expected, but we can hang our bra's on the clothesline outside, just not our underwear. I find that to be a bit odd. There are HUGE fields of sunflowers. I was really thrown off by this at first because I wasn't sure why a main crop was sunflowers, but then I realized that they use the oil in their cooking. There are no cookbooks to be found. I really wanted to get my Dad a cookbook, but I can't find one anywhere. People just know what to cook, and mainly cook the same thing all the time. Plus, my stepmom wouldn't like the idea of him cooking the food around here because it's all cooked with A LOT more oil, and a good bit of it is fried. Chai tea is very common to drink with or without milk. You should see the amount of sugar put in the tea though! It's almost unbelievable. It's weird though, because the people here can take that amount of sugar and love it, but once you roast them a marshmallow that is basically all sugar they say it's too sweet? As I said in a previous post, holding hands is a normal friendly gesture here. You see men holding hands all the time. When you meet up with someone, they usually take your hand. It was funny because on my run yesterday I saw one of the locals that I met. He grabbed my hand (while I was still on the run) and started running with me. He also had one arm around my shoulders, so it was really hard to run haha And last, but not least, the stars. I expected the sky to be amazing at night, but nothing like this. I wish I could just lay in the grass and stare at the sky for hours, but unfortunately we have to worry about huge spiders, other bugs, and snakes. I think a planetarium around here would be amazing. New tourist attraction idea! I'm going to start this and make good money so I can always come back here :)