When we finally got to my Aunts house after the long drive I was impressed to see how nice it was and how nice the gardens were. The house isn't too big but it isn't too small either. It is roomy but still homey.
There is a big living room. My aunt says that the people who lived here before had it broken up into a living room and a dining room. My Aunt moved the dining room table out onto the veranda right outside though. So, we don't have a dining room in our house. But, I think it's nicer this way. There is now one big room and it's broken up into spaces. There is the space with the couches and TV and stuff (the adult space) and then there is another rug on the other side of the room where Akira can play with his toys and there are chairs and a small table where we can sit in front of the fire place and have coffee or a snack. 
The kitchen is a regular sized kitchen. We have a gas stove which my Aunt is afraid of and hates, but it's good to have here because we loose so much power that its good to be able to cook even when the power goes out. 
In the main part of the house there are two bedrooms with bathrooms in them. One is my Aunts room (the bigger room with the nicer bathroom....of course!) and the other is used as the guest room. The bathroom in there isn't very nice though....just a shower sort of place and a small toilet. 
Then, there is a room that could be used for an office but also has some small closet space so it could be used for a bedroom also. It doesn't have a bathroom attached to it and its smaller. That is Akira's room.
Apart from those rooms, there are also two other bathrooms in this part of the house. There is another FULL bathroom in the hallway and then a small guest toilet room off the living room. This brings the total of bathrooms in the main part of the house to four. I just don't see why there are so many bathrooms....sometimes we can't decide which one to use. 
The best is my room. Outside the living room there is a porch which is enclosed with an iron gate. Still on the porch if you look to the right (within the iron gates) there is a door which leads to a guest room and bathroom. That is MY room. It give me my own space and privacy but is still safe as it still has all the protections of the house. At first, when my Aunt mentioned me taking this room, I wasn't so sure. It seemed pretty removed. But, it's really nice to have my own space....especially now that there is a baby in the house! 
The garden is bigger then the house and has a BUNCH of fruit and vegetables. We have a banana tree, a mango tree, an avocado tree and a passion fruit tree. I am waiting for the passion fruit to be ripe so we can make fresh passion fruit juice. I think my aunt wants it even more then I do. I wish we had a pineapple tree so that I could have fresh pineapple but sadly even if we planted one we would be gone before it grew much at all. The garden area is really big and there is a lot of space to run, lots of tropical plants and flowers. We have a gardener David, and all day long his job is to take care of the gardens and the animals outside. At the bottom of the garden we have a gate that goes to a veggie patch. My aunt has the gardener grow most of our vegetables down there. There are tomatoes, spinach, green papers, egg plant, carrots, celery, leeks, green onion, cabbage, and all kinds of herbs (parseley, rosemary, tyme, etc). she also has a small herb garden up on the veranda where we can go out and pick herbs when we are cooking in the house. There is another gate next to the veggie patch which leads to the chicken coop where we keep our chickens and our goat, Tembo. And, next to the chicken coop there is another small one room house. My Aunt used to have some guards that lived there, but those guards left and now the house is empty. We are going to start fixing it up and adding a bathroom so that my Aunt's Nanny, Hope, can move into it. 
When I first got here to Arusha, I loved the house and gardens but it did seem empty because there was nothing on the walls because my aunt had just gotten her shipment the day before she left for Morocco. After being here for a while we went through the room and got out everything and put them in there places and hung the paintings so now it feels more full but not in a bad way. We also went to frame some paintings, and to buy some more furniture. When we started doing my room there wasn't much to do there. I have a very nice painting that she got here in Arushia two years ago and we put it in my room. It is of three giraffes running through the bush in the night. Then when we went to the Masai market on my birthday, my Aunt bought me a longbow and arrows and we put that up in my room. Then we put up a new hammock in the garden and we are basically done with the house. We now have two hammocks in the garden, plus lots of benches and two lawn chairs. There are lots of places to sit and play in our gardens now.
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