The Maasai, The Blogger and The Wardrobe

Notice the guy on the right? I thought it was interesting to capture a Maasai man dressed in his native costume doing something mundane, namely transporting furniture (that cupboard has got to be one of the ugliest ones I've ever laid eyes on!). I'd never, ever see something like this in KL so I grabbed my camera but you've got to forgive the blurriness and crookedness of the picture.

I was driving behind the van when I took this and yes, I nearly slammed into the back of it as the driver braked to go over a road bump.

Yes, it was stupid of me to try and take a photograph while driving but hey, what kind of a writer would I be if I didn't do someting ridiculous now and again? Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway and Paulo Coehlo certainly didn't reach literary genius by sitting at home watching the E! channel!

Cappuccino For One

Am I really writing again after having posted just yesterday? I must be dreaming! I can't believe I'm being so regular (hmmm, that came off sounding like I'm talking about my toilet habits - yikes!)

I drove down to town today to stock up on my miserably empty freezers ( the one that comes with a fridge and an industrial size one that the good people who own this apartment have installed).

Salim (my friendly, neighbourhood butcher who's very likely the richest Tanzanian person I know) was in his shop and we had a friendly little chat whilst I collected my 2 deboned chickens, 1 cut n skinned chicken, pork fillet and lamb.

On the way home, I decided to hop over to the best Lebanese place I've ever eaten at for a take away sandwich. The restaurant is called Ali Basha. Granted, I've only ever eaten Lebanese food one other time in my life so I may not be qualified to judge but this place is SO GOOD that The Engineer and I catch ourselves thinking of what we're going to have for lunch at the place during dinner the night before!

I realized that I was in a bit of a dilemma when I arrived at the restaurant and placed my order. I hadn't brought anything to read while waiting!!! Now, this might not sound like much of an emergency to most but I have never EVER sat down at a restaurant by myself without some sort of reading material. Even at home, I'm always in front of the TV when I eat (this sounds a bit sad, I know but it's nevertheless true).

I'm always under the impression that people who see me eating by myself would think that I'm some sort of sorry person who doesn't have any friends and has no choice but to eat by herself.

Well, today, I just HAD to sit there while I waited for the food and I was suddenly overcome by a courageous thought. What if I ordered a cappuccino (really, really fattening creamy stuff absolutely WONDERFUL stuff that you can only get at this restaurant) and just sat there drinking it? No book, no magazine, no nothing.

I was suprised to discover that:
1) people didn't notice me sitting there by myself much less judge me and
2) I genuinely enjoyed just people-watching

No one batted an eye, even when I surreptitiously took my camera out of my bag to snap this picture of my fabulous cappuccino:



In other words, I've been worrying about what people were thinking of me when I should have been enjoying countless cappuccinos for one over the years. You learn something new everyday.

Only in Dar

We're back in Dar and boy was it difficult to get back here! You wouldn't believe how TOUGH it was to get an air ticket from Malaysia back to Dar. The Engineer managed to arrange his travel details through work but I had to stay back in KL an extra week due to the scarcity of tickets.

Who would've thunk it? Dar is a destination that people actually have on their itinerary! I never really knew much about Tanzania before I arrived here. Let's just put it this way, if naming the capitol of Tanzania was the final question for me on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, I'd have been out a million bucks.

After being here for a year, I must say that Dar has a personality all it's own and despite the unsightly rubbish and life-threatening traffic in town, I'm glad to be back.

The Engineer and I wanted to do something relaxing last weekend but shelved our idea of hitting Kunduchi beach when we woke up on Saturday morning and realized that it was close to 10am. I can almost hear our South African friends groaning at this - Phil especially, if he's reading this. Many a time have his plans been thwarted because of our inability to drag ourselves out of bed at the ungodly hour of 9am on a Saturday! Never a patient man, it was a testament of our friendship that he didn't beat us into a pulp for keeping him waiting (although there was that one time that I thought we were dead for sure!)

Outdoorsy South Africans just can't understand why we Mall-Walking Malaysians stay in bed so late on weekends and we can't fathom why anyone would want to hop out of bed anytime before 10 on a Sunday! A cultural dilemma indeed.

Anyway, seeing as the beach was out of the question, The Engineer and I fell back on our usual fall back plan - the movies. We had not watched a number of the summer hits and decided to take in Shrek 3. There was only one show on at 2pm.

We set off for Milimani City, a good 45 minutes away from where we live if you factor in the traffic jam on Old Bagamoyo Road. Since this is Dar, we know that the movie starts a good half an hour to 40 minutes after the time it is supposed to. So like good Dar-ians, we left the peninsula (where we live) at 1:43 and arrived at about 2:15 only to be told that the movie was scheduled to start at 2:30.

"But it says 2pm on your website," we say, not really expecting an explantion. "It starts at 2:30pm," states the lady behind the ticket counter unequivocally, unapolegetically, completely unperturbed. After a year of Pole Pole (slowly slowly), we too were well trained and unperturbed by the turn of events.

The movie started at about ten minutes past 3pm. All was well right up till the very end when the entire cinema went dark. We're also rather used to this because when the country had major power problems before, there used to be a lot more of these blackouts to contend with.

There were about five other people in the cinema that afternoon and every on of us let out a gasp as we noticed that whoever was operating the projector had managed to get the picture back on screen but had failed to notice that the picture was ON FIRE! No kidding.

There was poor Shrek frozen in the midst of saving the day from the evil Prince Charming and his entire face was being licked by flames! The poor kids in the audience must have been stunned into silence because there wasn't a sound in the cinema for a couple of seconds as we all watched Shrek burn. It was a cartoon and a horror movie rolled into one!

Anyway, The Tanzanian Projector Guys, eventually got their act together and the film continued, uninterrupted.

Still, how often do you get to say that you witnessed Shrek being burned alive? Only in Dar!