6/6: I've Arrived!

After almost two days of traveling, I’ve arrived in Tanzania. It actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The plane rides passed quickly enough (10 hours, 7 hours, and 5 hours), and I even managed to sleep on them. The delays were a little painful (7 hours in London and 4 in Dubai), but the Dubai airport is pretty cool. It looks like a fancy mall. We were excited initially, but then realized it contained the same duty free shopping that’s in London so we had nothing to do. Although we could have gone to the spa there I suppose.

Arriving in Dar es Salaam, the customs queue was a little crazy – a huge mess of people with vague formations of lines. We bought our plane ticket to Kigoma, which unfortunately will not be until Monday.

We checked into our hotel and after a blissful shower began exploring our neighborhood. It’s all dirt roads and tons of little shops and restaurants in little shacks. I noticed there were a lot of men hanging around – drinking soda, playing games – but not many women. I wonder where they could be? (Rhetorical question) There were lots of children in the street, and they all smiled at us. We had dinner at a bustling restaurant near our hotel. It had tables inside and on the street, and we had a yummy dinner of bbq chicken (Kristina) and fish (me) with chips. The fish took a good 35 minutes to arrive, so I’m guessing he had to run to a friend’s place to get it. The food came on large tin plates (about 2ft by 1ft) divided into sections – 2 large ones in the middle and 4 around the edges (Amy you’d be so happy – nothing touches!). The chicken/fish and chips were in the two main compartments, and then around the edges were two different sauces (one too spicy and the other that was delicious and tasted like a combination of sweet and sour sauce, hot sauce, and ketchup) and salt. The fish came whole (as in they grabbed a fish and put it on the grill with head, bones, tail everything still attached), which normally bothers me but since it was dark I was ok. Everything was eaten with the hands, so it was my first experience de-boning and eating a fish by hand. It was a little messy, but the waiter brings warm water before and after the meal to wash your hands. By the time the fished cooled a little bit, I was loving it. We were so pooped after we got back from dinner, we passed out at 8:30.