Moshi Town!

Untitled from Shawny Anderson on Vimeo.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Well, as predicted, we had another brush with illness in the night.  This time Darcy was the one who got overtaken, with Lily, Trevor and Shawny serving as the middle-of-the-night support team.  Darcy’s illness came and went as dramatically and as quickly as Trevor’s, but we are still being cautious as we watch them recover and as we attempt to protect the rest of the group from suffering their same fate.  We still can’t pinpoint a source for the bug that these two encountered, so it’s a little hard to play defense on this one. 

Despite their recent experiences, Trevor and Darcy both chose to join the group in its excursion to Moshi Town today.  We were mostly pursuing souvenirs (for some of you, no doubt?) but we also liked the change of pace and the very literal change of climate that we got to experience. 

Moshi is a hopping town full of traffic, unlike our lovely village of Marangu.  And it is HOT there, much moreso than where we have spent our time.  We headed into a small artists’ enclave just on the outskirts of town and saw lovely carvings, batik textiles, original paintings, jewelry, and lots of other fun stuff.  We got to haggle with the vendors in both US dollars and Tanzanian shillings, which turned out to be pretty fun. 

Lily is really good at haggling and Trevor is merciless.  Erin might have been a pushover, but Jesse convinced her otherwise.  Kyle got a piece that he really loves and Josh got a birthday gift for a family member.  Amelia showed great restraint but still got some beautiful things and Hilary struggled to find just the right gift for her parents.  Zoe stood firm on the amount of money she had to spend and the vendors buckled under her steadfastness.  Claire and Ciara made their selections pretty quickly, as did Alec.  Darcy kept in motion, despite the sleepless night that she suffered.  Matt locked in a friendship with the artist farthest down the line of the enclave while Dennis walked away from an item he liked knowing that the price was not going to come to the point that he hoped.  Gabe and Scott were pretty low key through the whole arts experience, but they both had a blast anyway.

From there we joined Simon for lunch at a cooperative that served pizza and coffee.  It is clearly a popular site for visiting Europeans and U.S. Americans so we added our numbers to the clientele today and loved every minute of it.  We hustled from there to another souvenir shop nearby and then stopped at a grocery for some favorite items to bring home. 

Once back at camp, we had to put some thought into our lesson plans for tomorrow, as we are visiting a local secondary school and we have been asked to teach something to the kids while we are there.  We’ll let you know after the experience whether the decisions we made tonight were good ones or bad ones. 

We have a lot of organizing to do as we get ready to leave for our safari.  Friday is going to go by much too quickly and then we will bid our beloved Marangu farewell, at least for now.  We hope to post through our safari, so please stay with us!