The Web

I'm afraid of many things and among these are dirty public toilets, camping and appearing at a dinner party in the same dress as someone else. In the natural world, I have to say snakes in particular and reptiles in general give me the creeps. Strangely enough, spiders have never really been the stuff of my nightmares - until now that is!

Even people who keep spiders as pets would find the following photo, if not disturbing, at least a little creepy:



Doesn't it look like something straight out of Stephen King's imagination? Here is the picture again in horror movie mode:



I actually felt a chill run down my spine when I saw them. I'm not even scared of spiders ( I actually used to play with them as a kid!) but the sight of so many large ones crawling about was a little too much for me!


I heard about this giant web from a newfound friend, L, whom I met at a birthday lunch a few weeks ago. She'd spied it while jogging through a residential area and her enthusiastic description of it ("its the BIGGEST spider web I've EVER SEEN and there were at least TWENTY SPIDERS there) propelled me to go and check it out.

After getting over my initial shock, I decided that I would take some pictures. I felt that it was the only way anyone would believe me when I told them about The Web ( I have to admit that I initially thought L was exaggerating!)

I got out of the car and stood as close as I dared (which was still a good distance away!) A few local people happened to walk past and saw me fiddling about with my camera, aiming at the spiders and they all looked at me like I was nuts. Maybe they're used to 1 meter-wide spider webs complete with 20 large spiders attached and were wondering what all the fuss was about!

In the end, my nerves got the best of me and I couldn't get close enough to get a good shot with my tiny camera. I related the whole thing to The Engineer who was immediately gripped by an urge to go and have a look for himself.

He bravely got a lot closer than I did and the photos are the result of his courage. I think this particular picture he took is exceptionally good:





It looks like the thing has managed to defy gravity and is hanging, mid-air. Eeeewww!!!! Despite the horror captured in the photos, I think it was a lot worse looking at the spiders live because they would all suddenly start crawling around on the web! Ghastly!

I would have imagined that an amazingly horrible web of this size would be hanging sinisterly in the recesses of some dark Amazonian jungle and not in the middle of a residential area in the biggest city in Tanzania.

This sort of thing always reminds that, in the end, we shouldn't be surprised because TIA - This Is Africa!

Zanzibar Secrets

To me, one of the most dangerous places in Dar is not the area in town called Kariakoo (where pickpockets apparently wait to pounce on the unsuspecting) or the deep waters around the little islands off the coast (where sharks apparently wait to do the same).
No...one of the most dangerous places in Dar sits innocently enough along Haile Selassie road and looks really innocuous.

Zanzibar Secrets is a little place which sells beautiful things at not-so-low prices. In fact, if you enter, without thinking, you're likely going to leave at least USD50 poorer.

This is a bad thing for innocent foreigners (mainly expat wives) who might find themselves driving past quite frequently. It's especially bad because women here are starved of any good boutiques and the allure of Zanzibar Secrets on an idle afternoon is particularly difficult to resist.

You'll be lured by the pretty, picturesque window dressing and the gorgeously tall, proud Zanzibar doors.



Once inside, there's no turning back....


There are lovely Zanzibarian tops, loose-fitting but stylish pants, beaded necklaces and bags and intricately-made lamps, all priced above what you would pay if you weren't dying for a good place to shop! The worst part is, all these lovely items seem to know your name and have no qualms calling it repeatedly until you find yourself delving into your purse to pay for them!

I've fallen prey, many a time and have now learned to keep my eyes on the road (where they should be in the first place!) when I drive past.

Despite this resolve, I've succumbed (most recently, about a week ago) and found myself coming out of the place in a daze holding somethingI never intended to buy in the first place.

Evidently, one of the secrets referred to in Zanzibar Secrets is getting their customers into a trance-like during which said customers make purchases that they never planned to in the first place!

Ras Kutani

Oooh! I had the best weekend ever!

Last Friday afternoon, The Engineer and I decided to go for a weekend getaway at Ras Kutani at South Beach. We'd heard wonderful things about it but our previous attempts at going were thwarted for one reason or another. So, this time, when the opportunity arose to spend a night, we decided to go for it.

This trip was possibly the most unplanned, last minute thing I have ever done in my life! I'm one of those boring people who have to have 5 contingency plans and a list of things to take on the trip even before I know the exact date of departure.

So, deciding on a Friday afternoon to go somewhere on Saturday morning is definitely a craaaazzzzzy thing for me to do. I felt so proud of myself for 'hanging loose' and being all laid-back but this feeling lasted all of two hours - between 2pm (when we made the decision) and 4pm (when I realized I hadn't packed yet). My momentary pride of being 'cool' went out the window as I reverted to my old anal-retentive self again.

Even though it was an overnight trip, a girl's got to have her essentials:

1. Moisturizer, toner, cleanser and other toiletries
2. A good stack of undies (you can never pack too many of those)
3.Makeup kit i.e perfume, base, liner, lipsticks (in about 5 shades. One never knows when one will be in the mood to go Purple Passion or Raspberry Pink)
4. Medicine kit i.e panadol, plasters, pills for going to the loo, pills to prevent you going to the loo etc
5. Swimsuit and related paraphernalia such as large, floppy hat, sarongs, flip-flops and the beach bag to carry it all in style
6. Sunscreen, mosquito repellent
7. Books to read
8. Clothes ( a couple of evening dresses just in case you get invited to a party - hey you never know!)
9. Earrings, bracelets and other accessories (to match said evening dresses)

I was running up and down getting all this stuff together when The Engineer sauntered in at 5:30pm. He took one look at his empty bag, randomly grabbed some shorts, t-shirts and underwear, threw them into the bag and was done packing. Grrrrr....sometimes men are so infuriating even when they don't mean to be!

Anyway, it was all worth it because Ras Kutani is every bit as beautiful as everyone says it is.

I'll let the pictures do the talking:









We'd been lucky enough to get one of only four suites and it had a little private swimming pool:


We sat around and lazed all day, had food served to us and just read and read and read. I actually finished Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns and almost finished reading Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting in just 2 days!

If only we could live at Ras Kutani for 5 days a week and come to Dar to work on Saturday and Sunday.....

Where's your Fairy Godmother when you need her? I'll even make do with this evil one!



fairy godmother image from virginmedia.com

Green tea and spinach juice

Today is my writing day.

This is the day that I sit down and write in a disciplined manner i.e I'm at the computer for hours at a time.... no phone calls, no tv, no nothing. I know it sounds dangerously like some kind of prison sentence but believe it or not, I find uninterrupted writing time quite therapeutic.

In fact, I often get so involved that I don't think about lunch This happened to me today but instead of stuffing myself with cream-filled pastries and chocolates, I've decided to go for the saintly route:



That green thing in a glass is a spinach drink (I saw Dr. Oz and Oprah drink it and found the recipe on the web). The other two are water and a mug of green tea. I caught sight of all 3 sitting on my living room table and could hardly believe my healthy, healthy lunch break. How goody-goody am I?!

It doesn't last long, unfortunately. I'm going to go into starvation mode in a while and I'll grab the first high-calorie, low-nutrition thing I see. There's a packet of chocolate biscuits at the back of the shelf with my name on it!

I suppose it's easy to be goody-goody when you know you can be bad again soon!

The ATM Hop

I was patiently (okay, I'm lying - impatiently!) waiting in the queue at Seacliff to withdraw some much-needed cash from the ATM yesterday. For some reason, the person at the booth was taking an age and a day to complete the transaction. I was about to go into 'silent curse mode' when he came out and announced that the machine was out of service.

The guy standing behind me rolled his eyes and said "now we have to do the ATM hop". A non Dar-ian would have gone 'huh?' but I knew exactly what he was talking about.

We would all have to go to the next ATM to get our money. If our luck was bad, it wouldn't be working either and if our luck was really bad, neither would the next and the next.....
Hence the ATM Hop.

Inexplicably, the ATMs in Dar (around the Peninsular anyway) seem to go AWOL at the same time. Go figure!