It feels like we've been here for ages longer than we actually have. Tonight is hopefully our last night in the hotel before we move to the house tomorrow. This means we won't have very easy access to email, but it also means that we will actually get to unpack, do laundry, and go grocery shopping. Right now, this seems like very good trade off. The house isn't 100% done, but it's mostly finishing touches and we're pretty tired of living out of our suitcases.
We've spent the last few days exploring close to our hotel. We're in an area outside of the city center where many foreigners and well-off Tanzanians live. Public transportation isn't very reliable and it's hard to walk many places, so we've been staying pretty close by. Luckily, there's a commercial street nearby with lots of stores and restaurants, and we've spent most of our time there. While most of the stuff in the neighborhood is pretty upscale and targeted to foreigners, this street is more local with non-Western restaurants and stores. We're on a peninsula, but we haven't seen the ocean much. It's always a surprise to see it pop out of nowhere, and the water is a really beautiful turquoise blue.
We're both pleasantly surprised by the food situation. We've eaten at a different restaurant every evening and several different lunch places, and there's a big variety of things to eat. There's lots of Western food around, plus Chinese, Italian, Indian, Thai, Korean, Malaysian, and lots of others we probably don't know about yet. There are also several massive grocery stores around that sell pretty much whatever you could want. Before we left, we had a hard time deciding what kind of food and toiletries we wanted to ship to ourselves. We didn't want to bring a ton of stuff with us and not buy anything here, because that's a bit over the top. However, we got lots of warnings that we should ship as much stuff as possible to ourselves since it's hard to find things here. So far, that seems totally wrong unless you're really hung up on specific brands and foods.
It's been pretty easy to speak Swahili here, in that people will speak Swahili back and seem happy that you're trying. It's also pretty obvious that it would be really easy to just get by with some very basic Swahili and rely largely on English instead. Brad and I are hoping that doesn't happen to us, but it seems to be a pretty typical experience.
Our big projects now are trying to figure out buying a car and the internet. Given the public transportation situation and because Dar es Salaam is very spread out, we want a car as soon as possible. We may buy a cheaper one here soon and then order a second from Japan, which would arrive a couple months from now. Taxis are fairly easy to find, so that is at least an option, though we'd like more freedom of movement. There are also these other things that are like a cross between golf carts and go-carts with three wheels. We rode in them in southeast Asia where they are called tuk-tuks. They tool around here too, though we've yet to have an uneventful ride. One missed our street and went off-roading onto the sidewalk and through a dirt field while another ran out of oil and broke down in the middle of traffic. Our house is fairly close to our hotel, but it's going to be a bit harder to get to stores and restaurants from there without a car, so it makes the car project more urgent.
The internet is also tricky because it's pretty expensive, you're limited to how much you can download and the quality isn't great. It's Brad's lifeline to Browns games, though, so it's taken on a high priority.
Tonight, we're trying to get our last fix of internet and satellite TV tonight before we move.
--MG
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