Annie Velter » Research

Music: Bongo Flava!

Annie Velter — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:00:09 +0000

My parents have strange taste in music. When Dad is metal-smithing, he likes to listen to everything from Queensryche (a hair band from the 80s) to Bach Cantatas. I guess it just depends on his mood. My Mom is the same way, she listens to Bob Dylan, Italian opera, and occasionally I’ll catch her bopping her head to Snoop Dogg. It’s so weird when that happens.

So it’s normal that I enjoy listening to all kinds of music, and in my preparation for The Big Trip to Tanzania, I learned there is a style of hip hop music that’s native to

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Where is Tanzania?

Gudrun — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:23:40 +0000

Our story takes place on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in various points around the town of Kigoma.

The Country and the Lake

Gudrun — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:21:54 +0000

Tanzania and Lake Tanganyika

After gaining independence from Britain, the East African territory called Tanganyika and the island of Zanzibar merged to create Tanzania in 1964. Tanzania borders the Indian Ocean, lies south of Kenya and north of Mozambique. It has a total area of 365,754 square miles (947,300 square kilometers), a bit less than one and a half times the area of France.

Mount Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania, as well as the Serengeti Game Reserve and the mythical island paradise of Zanzibar. It is where Mary Leaky discovered the footprints of our earliest known ancestors, Australopithecines, and Jane Goodall lived with

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She Already Exists

Gudrun — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:45:03 +0000

When I wrote the first draft of Antoinette’s Fish, I was too excited about the story to do any research. I decided to do it afterwards, and I cobbled something together with the limited fish-knowledge I had garnered from my husband’s hobby-ism and a travel guide for Tanzania. Now that I am rewriting, I am required to go back and check the biology and geography of what and where I am talking about.

I hoped that most of my facts were roughly accurate, so when I did fill in the details I wouldn’t change them so much that it altered the

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