Zanziblog

Martin finally left for Dar es Salaam. He is spending the afternoon in a meeting in Dar, and then heading back for Austria on Monday. Said then took me on a mini-tour of Stone Town - the University, many schools, including a Madrassa which is just another school (how hung-up about these things we get), and the local branch of Barclays (just in case).

We then strolled back through the Stone Town maze (there isn’t a maze - it is a maze), and ended up at the house where Masaka (a teacher from Kenya who is working at Zanzibits for another 6 months) and Guy (local name Moussa), the Dutchman who’s NGO created Zanzibits. Guy also runs a hotel out of town, so we spent an hour or two with Masaka, eating the remains of his last-night’s meal (tomatoes, paprika, onions & garlic, with local spinach - delicious, and inspires me to start my own cooking enterprise), and Said fiddling with Masaka’s laptop (he hates the dreaded yellow shriek ( ! ) in Device Manager, so fixed a couple of bad device drivers). Suleiman - the factotum from Zanzibits, who keeps the keys, and generally looks after everything, and when he talks, talks with his whole body, turned up and fixed a blocked sink.

We head back to the flat, with me taking pictures at every corner in a vain attempt to find my way back on my own (I have a standing invitation from Masaka for dinner), past Jaw Corner (the local equivalent of Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner), with Said teaching me Swahili on the way. There is no link whatsoever with the European languages, so it’s a question of learning by rote; difficult for me, as I generally learn by association. We shall see!

Discovered I’ve only got a few 100 shilling coins (100sh = 5 pence), as Martin took my few 1,000 notes (1,000sh = £0.50) last night for one of his (human) networking enterprises, and paid me in US$ which I can’t change until tomorrow (1$ ~ 1,320sh). This after celebrating his last night in a pleasantly low-life bar round the corner, with the cheapest beer I’v found so far at 1,700sh (work it out yourself!). So it’s street food for me for the rest of the day!