Late to bed early to rise seems to be the mantra of this trip for me. I got up at 6:30 and David, Alivianna and I did some pilates on the beach before breakfast. That alone makes me want to move to the beach when I get home. We showered, ate, and got ready for my last teaching ever at michamvi pingwe with my standard 6 kids, ages 13-15. The walk was hot as hell and I kept thinking about how I juuuust wanted to change into the shorter skirt I brought for our trip that Alivianna, David, and I would take to stonetown.
The kids were fine but some of the girls were begging me for candy and it really irked me. I spent most of my time here working to make sure they know that I am not some typical white person who gives them candy to shoo them away, and who genuinely wants to talk to them, and they revert back to the begging and annoying street stuff that I cannot stand. They really put a damper on the day for me, Mary, and Estela. But we had fun having them come up with their own play or song about vvu and ukimwi (HIV and AIDS) and said our goodbyes.
I was so hungry and dehydrated after class that David, Alivianna, and my plan to walk to a dalla dalla and go to stonetown without eating was seeming like a terrible idea, especially because it had to have been a hundred degrees where we were walking. I finally stopped us at a tree and waited in the shade, snacking on the last of my American candy, a bag of skittles and waiting about 10 mins for a dalla dalla. I changed into my shorter skirt on the street while David changed out of his khakis and into some shorts, which was a lot more revealing for the road we were on than my skirt under skirt change. Davids not only an adorable gay man who knows exactly who he is, he also has no shame from what I can tell.
We hopped on a dalla dalla and took the fastest ride to Stonetown I've ever been on. It had to be close to 45 minutes. We were going so fast and dust was flying everywhere getting into my eyes like no other! This will be helpful information for later. When we got there our first mission was to find an ATM for David and Liv because they were both closely out of cash. We went to our regular ATM and it wasn't working. We tried Barclays. Not working. We tried CDM. Not working. We thought that was weird but we shrugged it off and I told them Id buy lunch if we went somewhere sit down with American food. We wandered and wandered and got lost a couple times until we saw signs for a place called the Palace restaurant. We thought we'd check it out, and I'm soooo thankful we did.
An old Indian man greeted us at the door wearing very traditional muslim head wear and a suit with a smile under a thick graying mustache. "Jambo!" he exclaimed. "Karibu!!! Welcome, welcome. Please come in." he shuffled us inside as we looked at a menu and he chatted with us about where we were from and what we were doing in Stonetown, and we drooled over their American AND Indian food options. We all agreed to sit and he came and say with us in the middle of an empty restaurant seated in the middle of a three story building that looked like it came out of a Spanish villa. He handed us the regular menus and a coffee/smoothies/ice cream menu that made us die with excitement.
Alivianna ordered a Indian chicken dish that the owner of the restaurant said,"I prefer you to have with coconut cream sauce", to which she said, " okay sure!!" David ordered a beef burger and I opted for a spaghetti and bolognaise sauce. Liv and David ordered a smoothie and an iced coffee respectively and I held out for some ice cream.
They made everything from scratch and took forever but everything was so fresh and amazing that we didn't care. Liv's cool breeze smoothie was a delicious mangoey sensation and david's iced coffee was so good it almost wasn't there when he got back from the bathroom. The food came out about an hour later it seemed but everything looked amazing. Davids burger came out first and not only was it the biggest bun Id ever seen, the meat had veggies cooked into it and it was topped with cucumber and carrots and a little but of secret sauce that was to die for. It was the most incredible burger I've ever had. Liv's food came next and tasted amazing too! Last was mine and I was expecting just a little pasta and was more looking forward to the ice cream until heaven on a plate entered my line of vision. My pasta was piled onto a huge plate with chunks of meat an tomato cooked in with a bunch of other veggies in a really spicy sauce and cheese was melted all on top. Around the sides of the plate were sliced cucumbers, my all time favorite. It's like they knew.
We opted for a quick ice cream as headed out to try an ATM. We walked all the way to an ATM on the other side of town and it was STILL broken! We began to freak out because they literally had no money and we began to see that the whole day was shot. We were sitting in our despair when one of the street sellers tried to sell David a Zanzibar t-shirt. He was so tired of telling people he literally had no money that he told the guy," if you can find us a working ATM I will buy a shirt."
This guy took us all over town to find an ATM. He led us through every village and every road in town and didn't find one. We sat down where we began the day and David shared a cigarette with him and tried to get him to give him a shirt for 2 euro. That didn't work so we parted ways and david became the cigarette distributer with the other people around and we went and bought some tea and wandered around. Suddenly we had no money, we were lost, and no ride home and we began to think of how weird it would be to beg for money so we could get a taxi home. We were starting to walk down some really sketchy roads when we saw one of our teaching partners, Tatu in the distance. We nearly jumped her when she told us she knew of a ATM that works. She brought us to it and told us that Mary and Selina were at the park where the street food is and so we went to meet up with them. We ordered some sugar cane juice and looked at our watches knowing that it was 6:30 and all the stores were closing so all the shopping we needed to do wouldn't happen.
Selina and Mary urged us to go check and see if anything was open so we went and found one amazing store that we manage to get everything we needed in and for a pretty good price! I haggled the hell out of everything and after 2 hours in the same store we met up with Jessica, Lily, Mary, Selina and the other girls who had done a spice tour and mr. Mohammed drove us back home.
On the way home my eye started to get really itchy and I thought the dirt from the dalla dalla had gotten in it, but apparently that wasn't the case that I learned later. I tried to take out my contacts and my right eye burned like hell! I headed to bed after some blog writing and hoped it would feel better in the morning.
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