When you go from
working every weekend, with the odd weekend in Lancaster or Preston
thrown in, to having no plans in a small town in Tanzania, it is a
bit of a shock. On Saturday I spent the day walking around town
checking out the exchange bureaus in order to get the best rate on my
pounds and looking for somewhere to buy a USB stick. I found a place
selling a 1TB external hard drive and considered buying it to take
home as my 2TB one is more or less full now but it was US$210. No
thanks. The day was a brilliant one and walking back in the middle of
the day in clear blue skies granted me views that should not be
described with words but, as I forgot my camera, words will have to
do. Walking through the dusty roads of a poor part of town devoid of
high rise office building sites and trees allowed me full view of
Mount Meru in the distance with a single, solitary cloud suspended in
the sky just above its peak. Anyone who had managed to climb to the
summit that day must have had the most amazing view over the
surrounding area and on towards Kilimanjaro. I really want to be able
to climb Mount Meru as it is closer and not as expensive as
Kilimanjaro. However, it will still provide all the challenges as its
larger, more famous cousin and I will definitely need to improve my
fitness and lose some weight but that is hard when I am eating much
more than I did back in England. I really need to exercise more in
order to counteract the amount of food I am being given to eat by my
host family and I don't want to offend anyone by refusing their
hospitality.
We also were without
water or electricity for the entire day and this, like at home, meant
limited use of the television or laptop and therefore extreme boredom
for Quirine, Glory and me. We all become so used to electricity and
our electrical products that we depend on them. It gave me a chance
to start some of the reading that I have brought and I began with
Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and
the Sea', the short story that won him a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Thus starts my progress towards another one of my goals that I set
out in an earlier post. The host family also have the collected works
of Hans Christian Anderson and all of the Stieg Larsson books for me
to crack on with after I have finished my ones. Later that afternoon,
Quirine and I went to the Maasai market and I was able to have my
first taste of Tanzanian bargaining. I ended up buying some
candlesticks for 13000 TSH each and a necklace for 1500TSH. As we
walked to the market, we passed through what could have passed for
suburban America had the road been in a better condition and the
houses not been surrounded by prison like walls. It could have been
the setting for a Tanzanian version of Desperate
Housewives. The market itself
was not particularly spectacular. Many different stores sat in a
small semi-circle with their owners effectively blocking your passage
until you entered their store. The problem was that nearly every
store sold similar if not exactly the same merchandise. Very rarely
would I find something that caught my eye because it was different.
The candlesticks did, as did a few other items like the malachite
chess sets (valued at over 100000TSH by the owner but I could
probably knock it down to under 50000TSH) or a hanging painting.
Afterwards,
we had lunch at a local bar with two other volunteers. It was a
European style sports bar and it was a relief to have a greasy
cheeseburger and chips with lots of tomato ketchup. There are a few
things that I miss about England and the food is one of them.
Sometimes it was nice to just be able to have a monstrously unhealthy
kebab or a Subway or brie. Now I'm hungry.
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