Tz peeps should remember this place!
My friend Violet picked me up (bless her heart) at 1:30 am after my flight from Kigali (through Nairobi). It felt great to have good internet and convenience outlets for a little bit.
Violet lives in Dar Es Salaam and is a practicing architect. She is currently project managing a huge project in the city (more about that later). She drove me back to her house which is a guest house behind a really big house in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of the city. She just moved into this place (in Dar, you pay an agent to find an apartment for you then you have to give them about a month's rent as a finders fee). It was really cute, a 2 bedroom with a parking space, her rent went up from $120 to $180 per month, which is well under the US standard of 30% of her income. She said that the first thing she bought once she started working was a car because she hated riding public transportation in Dar. They have to buy cars from Japan and have them shipped to Tanzania, there aren't any car dealerships in the country, so she bought her car online (gas is about Tsh 1950 per liter, which Is a little less than $1). The most curious thing about her place, though, is that the shower is open to the bathroom. There's no tub, you just shower in the room. So we got to Violets place and headed to bed pretty soon thereafter. I had brought her a few gifts... Deodorant, because it's about $13 in Tz, and some running shoes (she wanted black ones so they don't get dirty). The first thing she said when we got in the apartment was that she sprayed for mosquitos... Which is great, she knows me too well. I learned this trip that Malaria infected mosquitos are females and they always come out at midnight, so the mosquito net is really the best protection from mosquitos, interestingly enough, because the dusk mosquitos are not the dangerous ones. But I survived the spray method.
The next morning we woke up and she cooked me breakfast (stoves here are called cookers) and we headed to the embassy, as Vai is leaving for Korea on Friday and needed to get her visa. We met Christopher (another UCLAS alum I met in 2005, also an architect) at his printer so they could print all the documents and we headed over. It was kind of weird being in the Japanese embassy in Tanzania. Somewhere I doubly don't belong. But there were some additional things she needed so we headed over to Kariako to meet her friend Rose, who sells African fabric.
Kariako is like the shopping district in the business center of Dar. I guess it's like an African Santee Alley but about 3 times as busy, bigger, and selling all sorts of stuff from food to cell phone cases to clothes to handbags. Unfortunately I couldn't take too many photos because Vai warned me about pickpockets, but there were so many people, vehicles, and tables filled with items to sell. I actually saw a woman who had a bucket on her head actually lose the bucket... That never happens!
Rose's office was in the second floor of the African fabric wholesale shop. It was air conditioned which was lovely. I asked her where she gets her fabric from and she said "China" which was kind of disappointing, but I guess that's the global norm.
So we left there and headed over to Ardhi University (formerly UCLAS) to meet up with Richard.
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