At popular request (OK, my mate Steve in Berlin asked) ‘A Day In The Life Of … Me (A Day In The Life Of … Nadine, is part two).

Generally I get woken up at 5.15 (no half measures Steve. You shall have the entire day) by the mosque dude. Actually he’s very melodic but just a tad too loud. Fall back to sleep and get woken up again at 6:15, by El Bastardo strutting the garden wall. Get up at 6:30. Throw a flip flop at El Bastardo on the way to the shower. Open bathroom door and check for living things or half living or spasming things in the corner i.e. ants, large winged insects, beetles, long shiny black, red and green millipede things. Oh, and lizard shit. We’ve never found the lizard in the act, but he leaves a heap of the stuff. I think the little sod comes with a carrier bag full from his house just to dump it in our bathroom.

‘El Bastardo’ aka ‘Old Yellow Eye’

Nothing with more than two legs uses my toothbrush and lives

Anyway, once the floor and walls are cleared I do my ablutions. Saline water but it’s fine. Once abluted, I retire to the dining/living room for breaky. This can consist of banana, cinnamon and yoghurt (deelish’), mango, nutmeg and yoghurt (deelish’) and/or a dollop of Nutella (YES OH YES. WE HAVE FOUND NUTELLA!) or local honey and banana between two squashed slices of bread (lush’ and deelish’).

Bit of a tasty bloke with some tasty food (Nads told me to write this)

Start drinking the first of what will be gargantuan quantities of water.

Dad, with your waterworks you’d simply have to stay on the toilet all day.

Wait for the work siren – Stone town still blows a siren to signal the start of the work day at 7:30 and the end at 3:30 – and begin the journey to work. 35 seconds later I arrive at work, via a saunter through the college fields and garden.

rush hour

Meet and greet my work colleagues. This is an art form in Zanzibar and can often take the entire work day to complete. As a rank amateur I can only muster about 10 minutes per person before I develop a nervous tick. If we’re lucky and he’s not busy we might get to chat with the college principle. Work, life in Zanzibar, religion, politics, football. Everything. A fantastic bloke. We enjoy our chats with the principal.

Our boss. Top man. (with a top frau!)

Our work colleagues are also all super nice and try their best to make the two wazungu (white people) fit in. I won’t bore you with the details of work. I’ll save that for another post. Lunch if we’re lucky will be when Esti brings in the home made Samosas. Big fat crispy puff pastry sacks filled with spicy meat. 4 will usually do the job.

4 ex samozas (scoffed by my wife as I composed the shot)

Work comes to an end around 3:30 though we often continue a bit longer as we’re conscientious and industrious little VSOs. Eventually we’ll stroll back to the house. Once home, I put on my smoking jacket, pull out the old pipe and slippers and have my dearest pour me a cup of Earl Grey into the family china. Failing that, I’ll leg it along the back road on my bike in search of road side food stalls selling chicken and chips, curried potato balls, dried fish, beef skewers etc. Most of it is a deep fried fat lovers wet dream (that’ll be me). You can’t take it every night so we’ll mix it with trips to the local market stalls for mangoes, tomatoes, onion, pumpkin, sweet potatoes and the like. There’s actually surprisingly little variety on the veg front. It’s all fresh but goes off really quickly so you have to get your timing spot on.

There’s also a beach nearby with a hotel in between the mangroves so we’ll have a wander down there to catch the sunset have a swim and a beer. Pretty nifty all in all.

Our local

Right this is a bazooka of a post. I’ve probably broken a whole raft of blogging etiquette rules so I’ll stop there.

Was that alright Steve?