Saturday night now. We've had a very busy week with our language training. So far we have learned lots of expressions, verbs, nouns, tenses, negatives etc. I'm really struggling to retain the words in memory . Jenny and a few of the others are brilliant. The logic of the sentence construction is fine and I can do the exercises but can't pull the right words out on demand. I suspect I never will but will settle for getting by with the correct, polite greetings and having enough command to get the shopping done.
Benjamin and Pepe are excellent teachers and bring in lots of the culture of the country. It's interesting how different they say Tanzanian culture is from Kenyan! Yesterday we wound up the week with a session on food (fruit and vegetables, spices, meat, cooking utensils, traditional charcoal stoves and methods of cooking some typical meals such as pilau with chicken, ugali (stiff maize porridge), coconut rice and the local spinach (greens). Then we were all given a task to carry out in swahili at the market.
The market is a crazy bustling place with heaps of small fruit and veg stalls etc. Lots of touts selling everything from plastic carry bags to rat poison. My task was to buy maize flour for making ugali and to check the price of potatoes at several stalls. Jenny had to buy five bananas and ask where they were grown. We managed our tasks with minimal drama but it all takes so much longer than just grabbing stuff at Safeway. The people are all patient and nice and have enough English so we can muddle through. I suspect I was ripped off with the flour but I wasn't confident enough with my haggling words. For those interested: 1 kg of potatoes cost 500 shillings - about A$0.40. Jenny's five bananas cost about 8c each. I paid 80 cents for my 1/2 kg of maize flour - probably double the going rate.
This morning we had great fun cooking all our ingredients into several different dishes. Lots of strange utensils to use instead of the modern conveniences we have at home. I plucked my first chicken. The chooks here are delicious but there's not much meat on them. We ate our food for lunch and it mostly looked and tasted like the food the nuns have been serving up. So far no-one is crook. Apparently previous groups have had some issues.
Birds are not plentiful or particularly diverse here. I've also had few opportunities for birding. Recently I've added Northern Grey-headed Sparrow, Black Crake, African Yellow Weaver, Thick-billed Weaver, Spectacled Weaver, Black-headed Heron and Swallow-tailed Bee-eater.
On Sunday we are all getting up at 0500 for a 2 hour drive to Mikumi National Park. We'll have about 6 hours in the park and have been promised elephants, zebras, giraffes, hippos, lions etc. I hope to dramatically increase my bird list then as well. Only three of us have seen African wildlife before so it will be fun. I'll post a special report on the trip next week.
Oh how I wish I could have watched you with that chook! They probably taste so much better than our forced fed, hormone and antibiotic fed, ones we get here, but I am glad not to have to do all the hard work.
ReplyDeleteThe chickens are delicious but scrawny. Not sure if the effort is worth it. I'd rather have the eggs.
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