Salama Safari, High Fives, and more

Day 2 and we're making good progress on our projects and learning what its all about on Dodoma. Honestly, I'm not sure you can learn what it's really all about - but we pick up a little bit of learning each day. We also share very important cultural information with one another. Today, we taught one of our hosts how to do a 'high five'. This further evolved into a fairly full deal of 'high five -..other side - ... down low....etc.' - later with a demonstration of the various conditions under which a high five would be used. We lined people up to show how you high five a team down the line - which was of great amusement to our Tanzanian host, as well as to Lucia from Slovakia and Sandip from India. Once all of that important cultural learning was shared, we learned a few more Swahili phrases - which will be of great use if I don't freeze up each time someone shares a simple swahili greeting with me!

Tonight was Kate's last night with us. Kate is from Citizens' Development Corp' - the NGO that is organizing everything. She is a really interesting and impressive person, and fun to be with - and it is sad to see her go. Apparently she believes we can survive without her. I will miss watching her try to negotiate various items like internet access, laundry service rates, cab fare, room safes and refrigerators. She has taught us that if we simply repeat the same phrases 20 times or so...that sometimes we will get a different answer (though often that is not the case). General stuff also we learned included looking for a train before walking across the tracks, and not walking in front of moving cars - things we tended to do when being in totally unfamiliar territory.

We went out to Club 84 tonight for dinner - and it was an interesting place. The menu was.......drum roll....meat or chicken and rice or chips (fries). After a tussle about the fact that there was no place to sit, finally culminating with 11 chairs and a few more tables arising out of nowhere, we agreed to finish ordering. Since I could not take another chicken dinner, and the meat was of unknown type, and I had rice for lunch, I decided just to order chips. The guy asked me if I wanted eggs - which seemed like a good option. When I got the food , we were all surprised to see that the meal ultimately was an omelette with the fries inside. I'm not sure how we got to that - but it was an interesting meal and was only 2000 shillings.

During the meal, where we sat outside, I noted also that there were several men standing behind us. They were in some traditional kind of wrap, and they had sticks coming out of their wrapped garb across a shoulder. There were 3 or 4 of them, and they seemed awfully interested in our table. At first it made me a bit uncomfortable, and then we realized they were basically watching us, perhaps interested in the 7 different nationalities that we added to the mix, and also that they were probably guards for the restaurant/club. Was told they were likely to be Masaii tribesmen, which are often guards at businesses. We were there until very late, and then taxi'd back to our hotel with our reliable taxi drivers - Frank and Salim.

New day tomorrow, with lots more to learn and see. Hope to talk to Brian from Australia to find out what more there is to do in Dodoma for the weekend.