Okay, so we've been in the city just over 24hours and interesting is not even the word to describe it! I was told I would have to wait for about an hour in the airport for Maria to arrive before we would be picked up by someone from the university. The airport was.. interesting, I had walked out of arrivals in search for my baggage to find myself in what seemed to be the departures/waiting/collection area. The bags were being thrown up into the room in which you enter first, under a large advertisement, if you can even picture that! Once I had gotten my bag and sat down in what I could only describe as, a very busy 3 walled room, I got a phone call from Maria informing me she was just waiting for her baggage (and had almost done the exact same thing as me!). Her flight had departed a full half an hour earlier than scheduled, and when arriving to the airport with time to spare she was told she was late and to hurry - probably the only thing we are going to experience being early in the next six months! After a few of our phone calls being ignored we quickly realised no-one was coming for us so we had to grab a taxi, with no haggling experience in the currency, we could have been paying waayy over price for all we know!

We eventually arrived to the university, which is well out of the city, at the end of lunch hour, so of course it wasn't the best of times to be landed with a large amount of bags in the heat. We eventually found out our contact was gone on maternity leave, with no word to us of course, another contact we had was in a "very important meeting" and was not to be disturbed, and the third.. well know one seemed to know who she was! Fr Peter was nice enough to leave his meeting to meet Maria to see what the problem was, his response was "Go outside to the land rover- someone will meet you", baffled we did just that (well I had been outside in the scorching lunchtime heat minding the bags!). We then found out that the university was a lot larger than we had thought and were brought to the second campus to the guest house in which we are staying. We were given the option to stay in a twin room in one building until a second room became available on Sunday, or have both of us spread out in two different buildings. For the sake of a few days we chose the twin room.We went into town for the evening to sort out sim cards etc (which you need a copy of your passport for -wtf?), we found a small supermarket, and got something to eat in a posh looking hotel because we knew of nowhere else! It gets dark here by seven so we were concious to get home before then for safety reasons, needless to say, living so far out of the city and it being pitch black, I felt quite abandoned - good thing I was wrecked!

We woke at about ten this morning, wanting to go and meet someone in the university to find out what was going on, but with the main campus being a 20min walk and by the time we were ready the sun being almost at its peak, we decided to go into town instead. I got my internet modem in the same place as the sim, I had a gut feeling I wasn't getting the best deal, but it's the biggest network here so I figured it should be ok, to later get home to figure out its only EDGE and not 3G as I had thought - basically the internet I get on my phone back home. So needless to say I'm rather gutted at the minute as the modem itself wasn't too cheap! While in town a friend of mine came and found us and brought me to his office as he had been speaking with my dad on skype and my dad wanted to "see for himself that I was safe and alive" - i.e. he's never used skype before and was amazed by this! While there Pieter bought us burgers and chips for lunch, which was gone in the space of two minutes! We were then taken to the bigger supermarket, so we now know where it is for if we ever get this house we're promised!

We came back to the guest house at about 3.30 and rang the priest who had sorted us out the day before to see if we could meet him, he said come to his office, so we proceeded to make the 20min trek (uphill) to the main campus. We soon learned that the contact which we had finally received from our original contact this morning was in hospital. Also the Irish nun we were to meet (no-one seemed to know who/where she was yesterday) had travelled to Dar es Saalam just after lunch, to travel to Cork for (only!) two weeks. All we could do was laugh at this stage as no-one who knows why it is we are here is in the university and everyone else thinks we are taking classes. We eventually got a tour of the campus, by 4X4 of course! To find out the campus that we are living on is actually the main campus and the main building which we saw on the website (which we thought was fake when we arrives) is actually right beside us. Turns out the university is ginormous! Although we may not be able to start work until next week, if even, I think the both of us feel a bit more relaxed now that we know we have the Deputy Vice-Chancelor (Who has a huggee building named after him- can't be a bad thing!) as a friend, along with knowing where we are, and where all the noise outside our building is coming from.

I think that's all from us for a bit, hope everyone else is settling in/keeping well.

All the best,

G & M xx