Weekend in Dar es Salaam

I spent last weekend in Dar es Salaam with Rebecca and Adam. Zanzibar is a fantastic place: the people are extremely welcoming and kind (except for the touts), the food is great, Stone Town is bursting with colour and beauty, and the beaches are the nicest I've been on in my life. However, the island does tend to get a bit claustrophobic after a while, and after two solid months since my last trip away from Zanzibar (going to Pemba doesn't count), I really needed to get to a big, noisy, bustling city, eat some pork, buy some cheap beer, and wear a sleeveless shirt.

On Friday evening, I had Lebanese food, which I've been fantasizing about on and off for about a month now. Hommos, taboule, and garlic butter have never tasted so good to me. On Saturday, we went to the Movenpick, a huge five-star hotel, to check out their breakfast menu (another thing I've been craving is a big greasy bacon-laden breakfast). We gave the 16,000 Tanzanian Shilling breakfast buffet a pass - that would have been about double what we each paid for dinner the evening before. Instead, for a fraction of the price, we got fancy cappuccinos and lattes, pastries, and mini bacon and ham quiches, satisfying five different cravings in one sitting.

We then made our way by daladala across the sprawling and extremely hot city to Mlimani City, a huge Western-style mall which sits, mirage-like, on a little hill above a landscape that otherwise resembles something out of Blade Runner, or perhaps the desert planet in Star Wars. The contrast between outside and inside the mall is a shock to the system, both physically and psychologically. Adam summed it up well in this blog post. The mall does contain one thing of interest though, besides its mega-stores, expensive cafes, and sanitized, air-conditioned environment: a movie theatre.

Each of us shelled out 7,000 Shillings and we saw The Kingdom, which I'd never heard of before, being somewhat out of the loop pop-culture-wise. After nearly five months here, I am clearly not used to the Western Movie Experience any more, and I'm still undergoing heart palpitations from all those explosions and shoot-outs. It was also disconcerting that I understood bits of what the bad guys (in this particular film, Saudi terrorists) were saying, Swahili having borrowed a great deal from Arabic. It was a fun movie, mildly nuanced (very mildly - just enough to prevent us from walking out, though Jennifer Garner nearly did the trick), and with plenty of cool special effects. Also I like Jamie Foxx, and there was one good line about French Canadians, so the movie did have some redeeming values.

On Sunday afternoon, we had a very nice lunch with Adam's host family out in a part of (huge, sprawling, never-ending) Dar called Tabata. Getting there was quite an adventure, we were in a daladala that even on a Sunday was so over-crowded that at one point, there were five people hanging out of the doorway as the bus careened along the roads. The food was exceptional, Adam's host family lovely, and the hour-long interview on CNN of vapid Criss Angel a painful reminder of the less-than-fantastic side of Western culture.

And then Rebecca and I boarded the ferry for Zanzibar as eagerly as we had boarded the ferry departing it. Nothing like a huge, hot, bustling, busy city to make you appreciate quiet, colourful Stone Town and Zanzibar's beaches...

One thing I don't appreciate here though: the bugs. Last night Christina, my Tanzanian roommate, rescued me by killing a huge spider in my bedroom. More cause for heart palpitations.

Also, I have a little thing on my desktop tracking the temperature both here and in Montreal, and I don't know who has it worse...

Montreal: Feels like: -15.4°C
Zanzibar: Feels like: 39.1°C