Meet Sugar…

…our new Land Rover. Matt doesn’t care how well it drives because he says it looks cool. Two benches in the back and wires to hook up the iPod – what else do you need? I must admit that it does look cool, but I don’t think driving this manual transmission vehicle in Arusha traffic would be much fun. Off road I’m sure it’s a whole different story.

Poor Anderson has been dealing with some nasty bites. Our best guess is fleas – I just can’t get him to stay away from the dogs b/c he loves them so much. We haven’t seen any new ones for a few days, so hopefully these can heal and we’ll be past this yucky event.

Here is our current skull collection which includes elephant, cow, wildebeest and zebra. The dogs see it as one giant chew toy collection (especially the horns). I really hope we can figure out how to get them back to the US with us.

I forgot to tell the story from the police stop on our way back from the beach a couple of weeks ago. I think Matt has mentioned the random stops and how sometimes you get pulled over for nothing and sometimes the police check dates on registration, insurance, etc. Well, so far we have been lucky and not gotten ‘caught’…until now. On the way back we were driving about 20kph over the speed limit and got caught with a radar gun (in our defense the speed limit had just decreased and we were slowing down, but still..). Anyway, when the fine officer of the law pulled us over he said “You can pay 20,000 Ts and get a receipt or you can pay me 10,000 Ts and I will delete it from the memory” (About $14/$7). Seriously?! I had always thought that the requests for bribes, incentives, etc would be much more subtle than that. So Matt says to him “so I can pay more to pay the fine or I can bribe you?”. The officer nods his head. On the side, Matt and I were having a philosophical discussion on what we should do. I wasn’t convinced that even the 20,000 official fine was going to make it back to the gov’t (and I’m cheap); Matt couldn’t stand the idea of paying an outright bribe. The officer was joking and smiling the whole time. Just business as usual for them.

(And, no, I’m not going to tell you what we did).