Out of tofu!

This is the first time the word holiday has struck fear in my heart!



Okay, that's not clear so here it is again zoomed in for full effect:


A closed deli may not mean much in the ordinary world but here in Dar, that's like a lifeline shutting down! There are no mega supermarkets from which you can get everything you could ever want under one roof. In Dar, certain shops sell certain items and if one of them is closed you can only dream about getting it from another store.

For me, that translates to my precious slabs of irreplaceable fresh tofu!The worst part is, the Deli isn't closing for just a day or two but from June 26 to Aug 4 - horrors!

Eating tofu always makes me feel so healthy and virtuous even if I follow it by stuffing myself with a whole bar of chocolate.

Maybe I should take this as a sign and just eat junk for the next two months?

Hapana Swahili

Despite two years in Tanzania, I have a shameful lack of vocabulary when it comes to the country’s national language, Swahili. This probably also points to a shameful lack of interaction with the Tanzanians but that’s a whole other story.
At the moment, I believe I am proudly on par with the Swahili spoken by a 12-month old Tanzanian baby. The only words I seem to know are:

Asante – Thank you
Karibu – Welcome
Hapana santi – no thank you
Umeme -electricity
Mchicha – spinach
Duka – shop
Badai – later
Sasa - now

I also know some ‘cheat’ words which have the same meaning and pronunciation as Bahasa Malaysia/Malay (Malaysia’s national language) such as 'dunia' which means world.

I’ve been quite lazy about learning Swahili because the majority of Tanzanians speak at least a little English and I have met a number who are impressively articulate.

So, I’m left with no real reason to learn Swahili because I get along fairly well in English. The only person whom I actually feel the need to speak in Swahili with is my housekeeper and even though her grasp of English is pretty bad, it’s still worlds better than my Swahili!

I realized just how bad my Swahili is when I thought of translating “I Don’t Speak Swahili” for the title of this entry and could only manage hapana Swahili which literally means “no Swahili”

This is akin to someone saying “No English!” when they don’t speak the language. To think that I used to believe people like that were pathetic – now I’m one of them!

The slowest Cats ever!

If it’s possible to kill an Internet Service Provider I’d squeeze the life out of mine in a minute! I use Cats Net and it’s seriously slow. To give you an idea, it’s slower than say.... the Girls of the Playboy Mansion attempting to add 25 and 19 without the aid of a calculator.

I happen to love cats and I thought that a provider called Cats would be quick and have 9 lives (i.e be quite stable).

Instead I’m stuck with something that’s the exact opposite – it’s slow and dies often.

This is what happens when you sign up with a service provider because it’s called Cats and not because it’s known to be reliable. I’m trying not to but I think I have to blame myself!

The Heart of Dar-kness

I just survived a trip into the heart of Dar. It wasn't unlike Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (that's the Heart of Dar with 5 extra alphabets!).

In Conrad's novel, Marlow had to brave a harrowing journey up the Congo river complete with attacks from the natives. While I may not have had to grapple with the Congo river, I certainly had my share of harrowing experiences this morning and like Marlow - some of them involved the locals!

I drove into town today because The Engineer needed my help to collect something from a printer. Firstly, I had to deal with what must be the world's worst Giver of Directions. The lady at the printing shop was very polite and very sweet on the phone but she wouldn't have been able to tell me how to get from her elbow to her fingersnails leave alone give directions from the Movenpick Hotel to her shop!

She kept telling me to "go behind the Azam ice-cream store" when she meant 'go past the Azam ice-cream store' and when I asked her if I was supposed to take the 3 o'clock or the 12 o'clock at the roundabout, she thought I was asking her what time it was! Fortunately, I managed to get there despite her help. I shouldn't have been surprised by her bad directions though - this has happened to me before.

Unfortunately, my woes didn't end when I finally found her shop. On my way out of town I swear I encountered at least 2 dozen local people who must've been suicidal. They kept throwing themselves in front of my car just as I was driving by. The good people of Dar may possess many fine qualities but looking left and right before crossing the street isn't one of them!!!

As it were, I narrowly missed killing a number of people. I ended up driving around at 10kms an hour, my fingers clutching the steering and my nose practically touching the windshield just so I wouldn't run over anybody's toes!

Because I was so obsessed with not hitting anyone, it was really hard to keep track of exactly where I was going. I eventually realized that I had been going round and round the same area. I'm not exactly familiar with Dar town which features plenty of narrow two-way roads and inexplicable 'no-entry' signs so it was a real headache trying to figure a way out.

At one point, I felt like I was trapped in an episode of "The Twilight Zone"......forever doomed to be imprisoned in the hideous maze of Dar. The part of town near the coastline is really beautiful but I'd be lying if I claimed that the city center is pretty!

To prove my point, here is one road that skirts the coastline, leading into the city.....

....and another.....


Now, here's the city.....



...not exactly a vision of beauty!

I finally found my way out after battling for a good half hour and stepped on the accelerator because I was determined to get away as quickly as possible!

The next time The Engineer needs me to go to the printers, I'm going to drag him with me. You won't catch me going in there all by myself again!

Looking beyond the obvious

The Engineer had a birthday a couple of weeks back and we had a great time with a small group of our closest friends. Everyone was actually very sweet to turn up even though I planned the get-together at the last minute. We had a little sundowner thing at the Coral Beach Hotel right near the water - lovely!

The Engineer didn't really want a cake (he isn't much of a cake man but will make exceptions for cheesecake!) but how can a birthday be a birthday without a birthday cake, right?

Seeing as I was still suffering from homesickness at the time, I was in 'no shape to bake' (hey! that rhymes!) so I thought I'd order one from this little place that the Bead Queen had told Pinkie about years ago.

This bakery is actually fabulous but it doesn't really have a name (not that I know of anyway!) much less a signboard announcing its whereabouts along United Nations Road. In fact, it's so much a part of the scenery that blink.... and you'll miss it!

The place may be nameless and faceless but boy can they bake! You name it and they can bake a cake of it! They have cakes in the shape of dolls, baskets of flowers, bicycles and even the map of Africa. Pinkie and I got the map for Girlfriend and the Boss when they were leaving Tanzania. The cakes taste as good as they look too!

I wanted a Spiderman cake for The Engineer who is a HUGE Spiderman fan but the ones they had were waaayyy too big for the number of people who were coming so I settled for a Batman cake instead:



See! Lovely and complete with black icing. They don't give you any of that awful, fluffy type of light icing that the commercial bakeries force on you these days. It's good old fattening absolutely delicious, butter-cream icing. They remind me of the homemade birthday cakes my mum used bake when I was small.

Now that you're properly impressed with the cakes, let me show you where they come from:


Told you it was nameless and faceless. It doesn't look like it's capable of producing a muffin leave alone delicious, gorgeous cakes. If there's anything Tanzania has taught me, it's to look beyond the obvious. The most beautiful things can emerge from the ugliest of places!

Only in Dar

I turned down a corner on the way home this evening and this was what greeted me:




It was as if the waters of some Great Flood had swept this boat inland and then receded, leaving the boat all by itself.

There it was, in front of me, right in the middle of the street. There wasn't a soul in sight to account for how the heck it got there and what on earth it was doing there.

Only in Dar.....

I want to go home!

Oooh....I'm battling with a horrible bout of homesickness. I still experience these spells despite having been in Dar for more than 2 years.

For me, extreme homesickness usually wears out within a couple of days before it levels off to a dull throb. This throb never really goes away but it's very much in the background and definitely tolerable. This time though, I'm back for a full week and I can't get KL out of my mind!

Time to come up with a I-must-keep-from-going-insane-because-of-this-dusty-town strategy.

No plans at the moment except to eat chocolate and sleep it off. This is probably a bad idea because it's only going to lead to me being overweight and lazy... then I won't just be a homesick person, I'll be an obese homesick person!

Perhaps I should force myself to work out? The endorphins might help me get out of this funk that I'm in but the very thought of waving my arms about and sashaying to one of my workout DVDs is annoying me right now.

Nevermind - I shall try to meditate (as The Engineer suggested) and see if I can revert to my usual, manageable level of homesickness instead of the I-want-to-chew-my-arm-off level that I'm at right now. If you don't hear from me in a couple of weeks, you'll know that that's exactly what happened!