Touchdown

Made it! Hongera (Congrats) to me. Sitting now in the big Post Office a few blocks from my hostel, listening to the soft echoes of Tanzanians sending letters in the big open space behind me. Rather soothing. I went out in search of food and internet and am exceedingly pleased to have found at least one. After this, the quest for juice and bread continues.

I realize that if my trip were a movie, the arrival in Dar only 24 hours after the end of the Jesus College Cambridge May Ball would strike me as a bit cliche. The difference is so great as to be sort of ludicrous. Gillean, my cousin, worked her usual artistic genius and did a beautiful job with the "Oz" theme of the May Ball - guests walked in through the creepily destroyed door of Dorothy's tornado-ed house (complete with squashed wicked witch feet), strolled along yellow brick road carpet pinned down to the lawns, sat under trees with glowing apple lanterns, warmed themselves by the enormous fake fireplace in the Witch's Castle. (I helped with making the flying monkeys. They turned out good and menacing, I think.) The excess in every aspect is enough to make a slightly "crunchy" American girl (as Mer described me) just the tiniest bit uncomfortable: 20+ musical acts, carnival rides, piles and piles of free food and alcohol. Gillean's friend Ali mentioned that she'd seen people at previous Balls order a free hamburger just to take a single bite and throw it into the trash. That's of course sort of the whole idea of the Ball, if taken a bit to the extreme: a truly sumptuous celebration in the old world style, 800 years old.

So to arrive at 5 AM in Dar via Cairo (where a Avian flu "checkpoint" caused a delightfully chaotic mob) was such a huge juxtaposition as to be sort of silly. There is a distinct dearth of tuxedos and ball gowns here, I've noticed. I'm sharp. Though the kanga dresses that many of the women wear are rather fancy in their own right.

First adventure: though my usually trusty guide book told me I'd need US$50 to purchase myself a Tanzanian entrance visa, it turns out prices have doubled. It also turned out that I had only US$67. There would be no leaving the airport until I located another US$33, and there was no ATM behind customs. (I really should've been better prepared for that. Who relies on ATMs in foreign countries? Suckers, that's who.) I think I would have been much more alarmed by the situation had I not spent the last 10 hours wedged into a plane seat - blood moving through my limbs again was a nice endorphin. So I managed to agree to leave my passport behind in return for a trip to the two ATMs just outside of customs; luckily for our story, both were out of service. I noted a strident American accent nearby complaining about the same problem to her Tanzanian acquaintance, and sidled on over to make friends. In about 5 minutes we had charmed our way past security and I was in the backseat of a car with Happy, Diana, and Sarah, bags and passport still behind in the airport, zooming through the darkness in search of a working ATM. First ATM only took Mastercard; apparently Visa is NOT everywhere I want to be. Second ATM - success! Back to the airport, to fetch the bags, to buy the visa, to reclaim the passports, to wave goodbye to my new friends and hop into the van with Majid, the driver from Women's Dignity who had been waiting patiently.

First day of work tomorrow. Hungry now. Hoping to procure some of that guava juice they served on EgyptAir.