The rest of the Arusha trip wasn't quite as exciting. Two things I noticed about Arusha, 1)It's expensive 2) It is a tourist spot, so if you are white you are treated like one. Many times while walking the streets we had these guys follow us trying to sell us things. Most often they would be hawking art that they made, and then following that with an invitation to see there store where they sell their art. After this invitation came inevitable inquires as to when we will go to their store, and why aren't we going right now. The worst spot was the sokoni, which means market basically. Sokonis are actually a lot like the farmer's markets of the western world, except there isn't quite the variety of items. There is however a very big sokoni in Arusha. The biggest is covered by a huge tent and has many twisting alleys walled by shops, vegetables, and massive open bags of rice. Anyway, as a white person you find that there are all of these very 'friendly' Tanzanians willing to follow you where ever you go to help you find what you are looking for. Not quite sure what their angle is or what they are trying to accomplish, nut they don't pull off a great sense of sincerity most of the time. This is especially the case when you are asked to go to their shop to see the art the make.

We also managed to spend some time outside of Arusha which was really nice. A place called Karatu is about 2 hours (if I remember correctly) from Arusha. The mode of transportation is really fun actually. There are buses that will take you there, however we took the cheaper (I think) but certainly safer route by using a car. This car was a nice ride. Decorated by a small picture of an Indian pop star in deep thought on the dashboard, the car was white with some rust and seated 8 people rather comfortably actually... well comparatively speaking anyway. It's what it looked like on the outside that I thought was really cool. It was a station wagon, sort of. It had the length of one, and the hood, but then it kind of morphed a little near the back end of the car, and it looked like a hybrid of a station wagon and the van from Little Miss Sunshine. The trip also included a really nice daladala experience while in Karatu. Daladalas are these glorified minivans that look like they might hold maybe 9 people, but somehow manage to fit 34 or so on a day that isn't busy. We were on a particularly crowded dala, which was too crowded for a head count, that had a roof that raised a few feet which was genius for those who were standing.

All in all- after nearly 4 and a half months- it's been an amazing trip so far. It truly feel like this was the right move for me, and that everything is working out better then I could have anticipated. I'll keep the updates coming... next post: Back at school