AWESOME day

I am struck with awe by all the beauty I have seen today. I got off work at 2pm, and have been wandering the streets since. As many of you have probably read online and elsewhere, even the doors here are inspiring pieces of history. They look a bit like over-embellished torture chambers (pics to follow when I am posting from my own computer), but the inspiration they provide is a bit less sadistic than that description seems to imply.

Anyhow, I am as safe as ever and about to enjoy a huge meal of freshly grilled veggies and squeezed fruits out at the Forodhani Gardens .

Habari ghani?

As you will see in every blog about Tanzania and language, greetings are the bedrock of interactions with people, whether or not you know them. Now that I am beginning to understand some basic variations, I can see why it is that my Tanzanian friends always seem to have something they need to talk to someone about when they run into them randomly on the street or elsewhere. Their substantial and intimate conversation is a minute-and-a-half-long game of finding one more way than the other of asking, "How are you?"
My best attempt at translating a recent conversation:
"What's the news this afternoon?" (Habari za mchana?)
"Good! What's up?" (Nzuri! Mambo vipi?)
"I'm cool. Greetings." (Poa. Salaama.)
"Salaama."
... actually, now I am forgetting how many they used, but it just kept going and going, as though they were simply demonstrating for me the whole first page of a visitor's guide to Tanzania titled "Greetings". For me, they do the same in English. "Hello! How are you doing this morning? What's up? How is it?" -- this said to me last night by a really cute kid who seemed to be showing off to his friends.

So, Kiswahili conversation of the day:
"Habari gani?" (What's the news?)
"Nzuri sana." (Very good.)

Pronunciation guide:
/a/ is said as in "hahaha!"
/i/ is said as in "ski"
/u/ is said as in "tune"
and when a word starts with an "n", don't be shy about making a whole syllable out of the letter.

Also, if you practice this with someone, do not feel compelled to make eye contact. The fact that I make eye contact with *everyone* gets me a lot of attention. It is not impolite to look at everything but your conversation partner in Tanzania... either that, or I have found a culture-wide case of ADHD that Novartis (maker of Ritalin) may be interested in.

A few pics from the last 4 days

In Dar, I made a very random Swedish friend (Sanna) at the National Museum; we spent the rest of the day together, during which she served as my foreign guide to TZ since she was finishing a two-month stint there. We met up with a friend of hers (a Tanzanian guy, Geofrey) and a friend of his (an American girl, Tina). A highlight of the day was visiting Geofrey's family, including his 2-year-old sister or niece (their relationship was not exactly obvious), who hugged me for about 3 minutes before letting me move beyond the front door of the house. It was quite enchanting to feel loved-at-first-sight by a child, but we decided that her adoration of me stemmed from my resemblance of Geofrey's white-skinned, brown-haired, smiley girlfriend. It made my first moments with little Gloria no less precious, though.

The four of us ended up at an Ethiopian restaurant called Addis in Dar. Above is a picture of our vegetarian spread before the waiter dumped all the dishes of food onto the injeera below. This is, indeed, one of many cuisines eaten with hands only. The bread below is torn, and then used to grab a bite of food. The bread just gets tastier and tastier throughout the meal as the sauces soak in. The waiter laughed at us for ordering as little as we did (it would have been the perfect stereotypical haughty French waiter scene if it weren't for the complete African-ness of it all), but we were all stuffed by the end.

The next day I visited a museum where 18 or so huts had been built to represent a variety of traditional Tanzanian villages. I enjoyed a great tour by a volunteer tour guide/musician/preservationist, and then a few dances by a traditional-style dance group:

I left Dar on a 7am flight the day after visiting the village museum, and got to work pretty quickly in Zanzibar. Places to live have basically been found for me (one friend knows of an apartment across the hall from her own that will be available in July, and one of her friends needed a house-sitter until then anyway), so situating myself has been much less of a hassle than it could have been. I moved into the house which I am sitting last night, and woke up to dogs singing "Happy Birthday". Well, it may not sound like "Happy Birthday" to most of you, but when we celebrate birthdays at my dad's house, his singing makes an impromptu choir of the dogs. It was a pretty unreal experience to hear my dad's vocal doppelganger calling all good Muslims to prayer this morning at 5-something AM, and then have that answered by the obligatory chorus of howling below. The dogs, by the way, are my security dogs. I haven't actually met them yet, but I hear that the universal language of dog treats is well understood by them. Pictures are, of course, forthcoming.

I tried to attach a few more pictures taken from the hotel I stayed in my first night in Zanzibar (which will give you a better sense of the awe-inspiring architecture and history around here), as well as the graceful exoticness of simple things such as mosquito nets and fishing boats. Oh! Good! They uploaded just in time. Here they are (out of order, of course).

In Zanzibar!

I arrived in Zanzibar on Monday morning, and was greeted with a very different set of people and circumstances than in Dar. Contrary to my expectations, I also moved into an office and house with no internet connection opportunities at either. Oops.
I am buying time at an internet cafe (without the coffee) until I figure out something more convenient, so there will be no pictures or long posts until then.
One nice thing about Zanzibar is that a greater proportion of the people you meet on the street speak English, so while I am learning Kiswahili, I can still fall back quite a lot on English in a pinch. Well, I don't even need to be in a pinch to rely on English now because all I can say are things like "what's up?", "thank you", "sorry", "octopus", and "I like coffee with milk and honey, but I don't like sugar." These have gotten me a long way so far, but nowhere near fluency.
While there is a lot of English spoken, even without the presence of a foreigner, it has a fun accent. For example, people talk about the beaches a lot to me, but, to my untrained ear, it comes out sounding like, "You must see our beautiful b*tches," -- particularly surprising coming from people who are exceedingly kind and respectful and seemingly unlikely to use such terminology even in their native tongue.

Time is running out. Feel free to send me emails, but expect very delayed responses for now!