Saturday May 17th, 2008...This is Africa

Well...how do I begin...today was an experience. Definitely a trial of patience and a character development day. We set off on the road to Dar es Salaam in our amazingly plush Land Rovers...not really but they are better than the bus that we've been riding in. However, when we stopped for lunch...we got word from the Maymester students that their bus had broken down. (This is Africa...TIA...be flexible.) So we had to send our Rovers back to the rescue. After a 3 hour waylay at the restaurant, the other group joined up with us and we tried to rearrange seating to get 39 people and all of our luggage into the 3 rovers. Luckliy Mama Moshi had called another bus to come pick up some of their students, but we still got a geometry lesson to fit 10 people in an 8 man Land Rover...good thing our generation grew up on Tetris. The ensuing 5 hours were passed with IPods and random get to know you better convos for the group...all in all a good time, but we were glad to stretch our legs and eat our dinner at 9:45 when we got in at our destination. Now enough about travelling. I am going to fill ya'll in on some ongoing experiences and quirks of Africa that have been periodically left out. I figure a travel day in the blog is pretty mundane...so I'll try to spice it up with this.

First...the really funny thing about TZ is that cell phones are just now taking off. Their culture has not really learned cell phone manners, and it is hilarious when they go off in the middle of a meeting. The people will just randomly answer in the middle of a meeting with our group and start talking while the person speaking to the group continues. It is clearly distracting, but I guess the whole..."I'll call you in a bit" piece hasn't caught on here.

Visitor books are HUGE here. Every stop that me make in the city, the business owner asks us all to sign. It is amazing because they want all of us to sign, not just the teachers...so our 16 people take up like a full page or two. Kinda of archaeic, but cute.

The people here are just happy. They will all smile and greet you wherever you are...so our Swahili is coming in handy. Also, the kids are always waving and running up to us just to check us out. These people are so glad to see us and they have practically nothing, but they love their rice and beans and two outfits and smile the whole day.

Another ploy for us is to say "Tabasam" which means smile...everyone we meet giggles at us when we do it. Now a couple of the female members of the staff call me Tabasam because I am smiling all the time. I guess you really don't have to speak the language to communicate sometimes.

One amazing thing to me is how many languages that everyone can speak. One server at our hotel learned Spanish last winter because there was a guest that came through that only spoke Spanish and Gilbert (the server) felt that he was under serving him by not being able to greet him properly...wow.

One last detail I forgot is that last night a tailor came by the hotel with fabrics and he is going to tailor a dress for each of the girls on the trip. I am so excited to have some "traditional" clothing to wear. The differences for this dress will be that ours is at the knee whereas theirs is to the ankle and ours will have skinny straps and theirs cover their shoulders...gotta keep it slightly American.

Well a long day of travel has worn me out...can't wait to update the pictures tomorrow. The Dawgs are still playing Bama or I would update you on that. Miss you all.

Tabasam, Britt