Beep-Beep, Move out the Way!

It seems as though I just won’t be able to shake the idea that I’m Chinese within the remaining time we have in Tanzania. We were asked yesterday what our indigenous language was, most Tanzanians have what they call “vernacular” which is their tribal or regional tongue, because they could not understand how I could speak English so well being that I am from China. As my hair becomes longer, it seems that Tanzanians are increasingly convinced that I’m Chinese, even though I insist otherwise. Luckily, Clement, our safari guide from Haydom, knows I am not Chinese, or so I think, which means that he can relay that on to other Tanzanians we meet along the way… oh well, I’ll be in Italy in a month where they think I’m Italian, so I’ve got that going for me.
Speaking of foreigners, they have EXCELLENT Indian cuisine here, it’s purely amazing! We have, as well as every other wazungu in Tanzania has (hello Alex, Bhog 56 anyone?), found “our” Indian restaurant which we frequent almost on a weekly basis. Our favorite place use to be Ladybird’s, as we exclaimed in a previous post, but it was shut down and we now discovered Purnemia. They dole out the strangest combination of sweet and spicy-hot I’ve ever had and we love it!
I continue to order the same thing every time we go there, little fried balls which are packed with the most wonderful fillings! One ball has an anise filling which has a slight taste of black licorice, another has what seems to be sweet-potato but they (the cook) insists it’s not, and the third, well, that’s hard to describe aside from delicious. If I had to articulate what they were, I could only describe them as falafel type of food. Along with these delicious balls come sides of spiced coconut milk with shavings and a spicy mango salad. After eating the mango salad, which is medium spicy, I thought that the coconut milk would help out my mouth… as you can imagine, the sweet, cool flavor of coconut going down your throat is great until the spice kicks-in! Fortunately, Betsy was prudent enough to remember water.
After having lived in Dar for about a month now, we’ve started to unearth new and usually better locations to acquire goods. We both love wheat bread back home but this is almost impossible to find here in Tanzania! We were purchasing bread from a local bakery down the street which only sells white bread; although, they are good at tricking you into thinking you’re buying something exotic. They have about twenty different shapes of bread, from standard loaf, baguette, bun, twisted pretzel, roll, misshapen loaf, lumpy loaf and last but not least, the mini-loaf. Betsy was insistent that we try every “type” of bread just to be sure there wasn’t a diamond in the rough. Needless to say, we never did find the elusive wheat loaf but we were able to sample a GIANT German style white-bread pretzel!
On our way home from the bakery today, we were almost run-down by a trash cart. Two men running down the road pushing an improvised two wheeled contraption, fortunately for us they had verbal warning system which mimicked a car horn and we all narrowly averted calamitous disaster.
-Ryan