This actually happened a long time ago, I'm thinking maybe almost a month ago, but it was an adventure so I still want to tell you about it.
One day, Brendan and I went on an adventure.
It began as a normal Saturday, I woke up, ate breakfast, did laundry, washed my bedroom floor to keep the cockroaches away, etc. I met Brendan for lunch after I went and checked my email. We decided we were going to go to Green Hut for hamburgers.
Green Hut is a Tanzanian owned lunch spot that is (supposedly) famous for having good hamburgers (by Tanzanian standards). Walking in, it seemed like a fairly normal Tanzanian restaurant, but it was jam packed. They sat us at a table with another man because there wasn't any open tables (this is a normal occurrence). The man was strange and didn't speak with us, but that was okay- we just sort of started pretending that he wasn't there.
The hamburgers came with French fries ("chips" here) and ketchup (Tanzanian ketchup is like sweet red sauce) and some other unidentifiable sauce on them. They were pretty awful. Sort of bready and unflavorful, I think I ended up eating mostly French fries for that meal (which I don't even like very much). We were disappointed that it had turned out to be such a disappointment after so much hype. But we decided to go to the Cultural Heritage museum to brighten our day.
The Cultural Heritage museum is a super mzungo touristy spot filled with African-esque artwork, wood carvings, multiple massive gift shops, and a restaurant that lists all of its prices in American dollars (it's owned by an Indian family).
We thought maybe we should take a picky picky to get there ( a motorcycle taxi) but it would be hard to find someone who could be convinced to take two people and we weren't quite sure where it was. So we began to walk up the main road that runs through Arusha. After walking for about twenty minutes, we realized we really didn't know where we were going and that it would be a long long walk. So we went to a group of picky picky drivers hanging out on a street corner and after some hassle got two of them (one for each of us) to take us to the museum. The one who was driving me didn't know where he was going. We just followed Brendan's picky driver who was racing ahead, weaving in and out of traffic. At one point we lost sight of him, so I told the driver to just keep driving till I recognized a landmark. Eventually both Brendan and I ended up at the museum.
It was beautiful. The artwork isn't very well preserved so many of the paintings were warped and because there was construction going on, there was sawdust everywhere. But the building itself was gorgeous and it was cool to see the paintings, carvings, and photographs of Tanzanian things (not necessarily by Tanzanian artists as I found). There are multiple pictures of this up on Picasa.
After a longish romp through the building, and the multiple gift shops- we had some juice at the restaurant- only a tourist place would think it was okay to charge $3 (American) for a glass of mango juice when you can get it for the equivalent of $.80 (American) anywhere else in Arusha. It was then time to head to the rugby game we knew was happening at TGT.
Problem- we didn't know where TGT was. We asked a man at the museum who essentially told us it was 2km maximum distance up the road. So we decided to walk. The walk was beautiful. We walked through coffee plantations, saw some monkeys, walked past the international school, and walked way way out of Arusha. An hour and a half later we realized we were at the airport. It had been far more than 2 km. Ah but there, up ahead, was a sign for a Barclay's and TGT. We headed down a dirt road away from the main road. Twenty minutes down the road we had passed nothing resembling TGT. It was about 45 minutes till nightfall, storm clouds were gathering above our heads, and we could see the rain moving towards us.
I told Brendan we should walk to the next bend in the road and if we didn't see anything we should turn around, he agreed. Obviously, nothing was different around the bend so we headed back to the main road (turns out if we had walked five more minutes we would have made it- even though the game would have been long over already).
The thunderstorm was growing closer by the minute, we could see the lightening in the distance and could hear thunder and sundown was roughly 30 minutes away. But we were more than two hours away from town (we had only originally walked from cultural heritage which is already outside of the city a bit). We decided to start walking back and to flag down a dalla dalla if one passed us.
Shortly after we began to walk an overly filled dalla dalla comes flying down the road. We wave it down, only to find that there are absolutely NO seats left in this dalla dalla. I ended up squished half squatting next to a teenage girl sitting on some old man's lap (gross), sitting next to many other people sitting on other peoples laps. Brendan stood on the sideboard of the dalla dalla hanging out the side of the bus with maybe 4 or 5 other people also standing on the outside of the bus as it drove into town.
We made it to a restaurant just as the downpour began – back in Arusha town center after a crazy adventure. It was an enjoyable experience though. Thanks for letting me share!
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