Jambo/Hello! Day 2 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I am here to work on my UCSF Global Health Sciences project.
Sher-Ping, a UCSF colleague and travel-mate, and I ventured to the Kariakoo Market in Dar es Salaam this morning to find sim cards and a cheap cell phone for me. To our wonder and amazement, we found a delightful authorized Nokia dealer and tampon retailer! All in one tiny shop! Diapers and pads were also prominently available. It's a fascinating market niche. Forget to ask if you should pick something up? We can help you.... Another aspect of buying a cell phone here is that there isn't some quiet store you enter to buy a phone and calling plan. Here, you can buy a phone from any number of retailers whose shop counters are directly on the street, negotiate the price of the phone, then decide how many thousand Tanzanian shillings you want to put on your phone plan based on the company associated with the sim card you happened to get (you pay by usage), pay in cash as in nearly all things here, and hope that the transaction was truly legit. It was. The phone worked after one of the staff here at the hotel got his teenage son to help us figure out how to get it connected while he tried hard not to look at us like we were technological idiots. ;-) Asante sana/thank you.
We decided to brave the elements and walk the 1.5 miles through Dar from Upanga to Kariakoo... which everyone at our home away from home, the Swiss Garden Hotel, seemed to think was a fairly bizarre thing to do. Through these shaking heads of disbelief Ali, our hotel handler, reminded us that this was to be our last night at the venerable Swiss Garden, and, having no other place to live, we decided it would be good to perhaps extend our stay. Which meant changing rooms, which further delayed our planned 7 am departure for Kariakoo (early in the day is a very good time to be out and and about here). To really come clean and confess, walking seemed easier than attempting to negotiate the jam-packed dala dalas, mini vans occasionally missing the side door, and a walk might possibly be cooler than inside a crowded vehicle, a very relative term here, breezes from missing side doors notwithstanding.
A couple things about walking in Dar. First, keep your wits about you. There are few 'managed' intersections and cars/trucks/dala dalas/motorcycles/? don't stop, including turning off cross streets, coming from a direction that is not yet second nature (keeping more or less left, not right). We had one particularly close moment with a fast-moving dump truck from behind as we walked along the side of a narrow street (millimeters, seriously). Second, there are small lakes, giant potholes, and seas of mud to manage while also keeping aware of traffic coming from every conceivable direction also trying to manage the pothole/water/mud obstacle course and threading their way through throngs of people at speeds meant to convey thoroughfare supremacy. On our way back we melted into chairs in a tree-shaded cafe at the United Nations Road gate into the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS, our partner institution) to have a Coke. A real Coke, after Sher-Ping's experience of buying a faux "Diet Coke" on the street in Kariakoo that really was disgusting. It looked like the 'real thing!' ...in Arabic... the choice of language in a non-Arabic speaking country perhaps might have been a clue. Seriously not remotely close.
I'll have photos once I figure out how to upload them... a bit like the cell phone issue with the available internet connection....
Lala salaame/good night.
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