I slept really well for the first time since I got to Africa. It was really cold the previous night. The first thing on today’s list was to visit the nearby Masai Museum and village.
The explanation we got in the museum was exactly like what I watched last night on Bizarre Food with Andrew Zimmern – how they drink cow’s blood, how their BBQ is different, etc. We were greeted by about 15 Masai kids upon entering the village. They were all very dusty and a kid probably the height of my waist, was carrying a baby on her back.
Many of them put their hands out to us, wanting us to swing them in the air.
After about 15 minutes with the kids, we went into the area of the house of one of the Masai men. Masai men are polygamous, for every wife the dowry is 15 cows. That particular village – one man, had 9 wives (each wife has her own hut) and 60 children. I’m wondering where did he firstly find 135 cows and how are his sons going to get married? Where are they going to find cows? Will the father help? Hmm…
We stopped at K-Sem, the school built by the University of Nottingham, where Praveen, Monil and the rest have been teaching at for the past 6 weeks. It was a nice school – 3 Masai huts: one for English, one for computers and one for kindergarten. School is 3 days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Then we watched 6 Masai men dance their famous jumping dance while making this music, like a choir somewhat.
Next was lunch which was a burger with coleslaw and then we headed into Arusha town. After changing 50USD into Tanzanian shillings and a quick look at a shop, I immediately spent the next hour on the internet. It took me about 10 minutes to log into my gmail, 20minutes to log into MSN Messenger (It was 2009). Internet here really shows that you’re in a third world country. I bought two bottles of water and then headed for the Cultural Village which sold Tanzanites, a gem rarer than diamonds, only discovered in the foots of Mt. Kilimanjaro in the 1960s and only have 7 years left of mining. World leaders from Bill Clinton to George Bush have visited the place. Apparently sales are about 3 to 4 million USD a month.
Dinner was pretty amazing. We had steak, massive sausages, spinach, cabbage with peanut butter and potatoes. Dessert was amazing: banana with Mars bars cooked on the fire which tasted so sweet and quoting Cass “disgustingly delicious”, ferrero rocher and Jamie’s birthday cake.
