DAY 205: "Wow, I haven't seen one of these in a while," I said to Tony in the kitchen as he made his morning coffee before going to work. I went to get some milk.

"What, a refrigerator?"

"Yeah."

After being on a non-stop tour for ten days in a row in the wilds of Africa, climbing mountains and going on safari, it was nice to come back to the conveniences of modern life.

THE REFRIGERATOR WAS JUST ONE OF THE LITTLE THINGS of modern technology that recharged my soul. That and the fact that I was staying in another ex-patriate bubble of American suburbia for a while with computers, MP3s, DVDs and a portable "Mr. T in Your Pocket" talking keychain (172k .WAVe file). Needless to say, I barely had reason to leave the apartment.

That's not to say I didn't veg in, watch movies and play with talking keychains all day. (I pity the fool that does.) I had a long day of Blog writing ahead of me, which I was soon discovering by early afternoon, would spill into the next day, or even the next. From eight in the morning until about two in the afternoon I didn't even get up to typing my handwritten work yet; for hours I had sorted through over 1,200 digital photos between my little digital spy camera and my camcorder.

TED CAME HOME SICK with a fever in the middle of the afternoon as I was two typed entries into my work on my iBook. A stomach flu virus was going around the apartment -- Tony had it the weekend before -- and it finally made it's way to the other resident of the flat.

"There's something going around," Ted told me.

"So I'll probably get it next?"

"Yeah."

Ted went into his room to sleep it off. Later I gave him some anti-gripal pills labeled in Portuguese that I bought in Brazil, which knocked him out again.

IT WAS PAST FOUR O'CLOCK in the afternoon, and I figured that I should at least get some air after being in front of a computer screen all day. Besides, the travel agent woman downstairs was waiting for me since Tony told her I'd come by to sort out my flights after Moshi. I finally put some pants on and head on down for the ten-second walk. As if refrigerators weren't convenient enough, there was a travel agency right downstairs in the same building.

Ndowo, the very friendly woman of World Quality Travel, sorted me out with flights that would get me to Zanzibar and from there to Addis Ababa in the most convenient way possible with the lowest cost -- the airline would even send a car to pick me up at the apartment. I booked a provisional itinerary with her so that I could sleep on it and then head back upstairs to the flat. Tony came home three minutes after I did.

HEARING THAT TED WAS SICK, Vietnamese-American Tony started preparing a homemeal Vietnamese chicken porridge with all the vegetable and chili trimmings to ease the pain of his roommate. However, Ted was feeling pretty sick and couldn't put any food in his stomach.

"Looks like its just the two of us," I told me. He put all the steaming dishes on the dining table (picture above) like a waiter of wholesome homecooked food, telling me his grandmother would have been proud. We ate the chicken, basil, cabbage and rice with condiments of salt, nuoc cham hot sauce and fish sauce over conversations of PCs vs. Macs, and in the end there was still a lot of food leftover. I wondered what Tony would do with it, but then I remembered, Aha! Someone invented the refrigerator!

Sure the homecooked meal was much appreciated, but wow, the refrigerator. What a concept.

For more about my history with refrigerators (yes, I actually have history with kitchen appliances), click HERE.