Dar es Salaam

      Hello, once again, and welcome back. The group and I have recently returned from our trip to the capital of Tanzania: Dar es Salaam and the beautiful archipelago Unguja or more commonly known as Zanzibar. After returning to Arusha, the group was exhausted from one of the most exciting and busiest weeks during our stay in Tanzania. I hope you enjoy the pics and chronicle

Dar es Salaam

A view from the window outside Chris and my room

                Our trip to the coast included three days in Dar es Salaam and three days in Zanzibar. We left for Dar the 9^th of June, a Saturday, early morning. Our ten hour road trip brought us to a bustling city in the midst of a lot of development projects and construction. Traffic was slow but we arrived at our hotel with out too much delay around 7 p.m. After settling to our new hot and humid quarters we met in the hotel's restaurant to eat and relax. Chris informed the group that his mother, Mrs. Askew, was in town and had invited us to a concert by The Kilimanjaro Band who are family friends of Mrs. Askew.  Majority of the group quickly agreed, though we were all a tad tired (a feeling that would remain for the rest of our trip). We ate dinner, had intense negotiations with taxi drivers, then piled into the taxis to make our escape for the evening.

The Kilimanjaro Band

 We arrived at the concert early, around 10:30 which gave those who didn’t know the exceptional Mrs. Askew some time to become acquainted with her. We (not tot be cheesy) we danced the night away with Mrs. Askew.

    Our first day was spent in Bagamoyo, there we visited the Kaole ruins;  13^th century ruins in Dar. Mosques as well as tombs reflect the Islamic influence along the east coast. The guide spoke of the history of Zanzibar and of its sultans. Another situation where my kindergarden swahili skills hindered my understanding :/
Also by the Kaole ruins we saw a 500 year old Baobab tree:

The rest of our first day was spent at a beach side resort; a chance to catch our breath. With such little time and so much to do the group and I had been running around from the crack of dawn until two in the morning too often! We made sure to take a second to act like the graduate and undergraduate students we were:

    Monday was spent touring and learning about the history of Dar; we visited the national museum there. The renovations were beautiful and I really enjoyed the history section on Nyerere. The museum also included a massive biology and an anthropology section. After sometime in the museum we headed towards the U of Dar. I woke up on the bus to both of my legs still sleeping, I wasn't initially excited to wake them either. The group and I rose from our seats like zombies still trying to catch our breath, looking forward to a tour the campus which was beautiful. However, it didn’t take us long to make our way through and around campus so some of us took the time to tour Dar a bit more. The roads were pretty bad and traffic was a high stakes game of Frogger. The tall buildings that  decorated the skyline were either under conctruction or luxurious, Dar was quite the place to visit to say the very least.

    We concluded our stay in Dar with Ethiopian cuisine that night in order to celebrate Jesse's, a graduate from our group, birthday which was really fun, delicious, annnnnd of course interesting; we used no plates or utensils. The food was organized in piles on a covered table. We used thin rolls of a bread like wrap called “Njira” it was used to grab the food; eating the njira with a portion from the pile. I also tried Ethiopian coffee while after the meal which was really rich.