Pennywise's Bucket

A very quick post as I take a break from grading a virtual pile of Othello papers.  Here's a fairly nondescript picture that I snapped on our return trip to Zanzibar in May.  It's a typical view from the rooftop of the Flamingo Hotel in Stone Town.  We'd have breakfast there every morning - it was always a couple eggs, some bread, and some fresh fruit - but it was a popular place to sneak away at various times during the day to read or talk or try and catch a breeze (which was much more necessary in March, and will be in January, than it was in May at the end of the monsoon season).  If you look in the background you can see a red bucket, which was the same bucket that Steve bought for the students two years ago so that they (and we, for that matter) could wash our clothes.  It's funny, if their parents had asked them to wash their clothes in a bucket there would have been much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but because it was in Africa the students considered it quite the adventure.  You could then hang the clothes up on the roof, and, not surprisingly, they didn't take long to dry in the 100 degree heat and blistering equatorial sun.  Sadly, on our next trip in January the Flamingo is going to be closed for renovation (or maybe not, it's east Africa after all), which means we'll probably have to buy another bucket which we'll leave as a gift for the Karibu Inn.

If you look at the picture long enough eventually a red balloon will rise above the wall.