Wikendi

Picasa and I have joined forces to conquer the interwebs, communicate across vast distances, take pollution down to zero! First, a link for the May Ball album. Hopefully the captions and Gillean's coming facebook photos (cough, cough) will be enough to narrate the whole evening.

And then, one short week later, a few pictures from recent Dar adventures. I tried to use this weekend to see some of the main city spots that appealed to me, since I'll be away from the coast for the next two weekends. (And I was just getting kind of comfortable here, too. Such a habit-forming creature I am.)

After the usual breakfast (three slices of toast with tea; bananas if the matrons are feeling generous. I've heard there are occasionally eggs but I suspect this to be an urban legend), I headed down to the "African" part of town. Kind of funny to have an African part of town in a city in Africa, but that's colonialism for you. I wandered through the Kitusu market first, a collection of closely packed stalls selling mostly food. A little claustrophobic, especially when I had to step over a posse of about 30 loose chickens in a small ditch. (I saw two of them being carried away, still alive, in a plastic bag that allowed their heads to stick out and enjoy the view. They looked pleased.) Next, to Ilala fabric market, where all the ladies of Dar get their kangas from an overwhelming selection. I'd like one but I think it'll have to wait until I learn my colors in Swahili. Then to Kariakoo, the huge market built in the buildings that used to house the British Carrier Corps (hear it? Carrier Corps? Kariakoo?). Cooler, thanks to the crazy roof (see pictures), but not as manic as the earlier markets of the day.

Then, in an act of bravery or possibly heatstroke, I leapt aboard a daladala headed for the Kivukoni seafood market, where all the ferries leave Dar. Riding a daladala is kind of awesome, and I will write about it more, in a future blog posting dedicated solely to transportation in the city. You smell the seafood market for several blocks before you arrive at Kivuknoi, and a truly fine array of scaled heads and tenacled legs awaits the shopper. The water right off the ferry dock is mostly filled with trash, but a walk up Ocean Drive, just to the east, has some very lovely views. The water is so very blue, and almost wave-free. Apparently the Indian Ocean is rather zen compared to the Atlantic.

Sunday, my fellow lodgers Happy (a Tanzanian studying German in Dar for the summer) and Dorothee (a German med student) and I headed even further south, to Kipepeo beach. Actually getting onto the beach was a little tricky - some resorts charge entry fees just to let you walk over their sand to the water - but we eventually made it to the ocean. A very relaxing afternoon, filled with sleeping and reading and bargained-for ice cream. One interesting thing: of all the people on the beach, I think that Dorothee and I were the only ones who could actually swim. The native Tanzanians and Indians stayed very close to the shore for the most part, unless armed with floats. Dorothee thought that swimming might be sort of a luxury for most people here, but I wondered about the practicalities of that - plenty of people make their living from the water in the city, and it wouldn't do to be drowning if your rinky-dink boat capsized. Perhaps most of the people at this beach had come from inland? (The situation did turn me into a sort of hero, however, when I rescued a little boy's inflatable toy that had blown out to sea. Good way to make an instant friend.)

Got a Tanzanian cell phone today. Pretty delighted with it. $35, works immediately and can be switched over to any other network with a mere snapping in of another SIM card. Get with it, America.