no one said this would be comfortable

so i'm a bit unsure as to blogging, i'm going to have to just pretend this is an email to all of my friends, rather than topical.

the title of this post comes from a rather ridiculous situation chris and i encountered at our friend glory's house yesterday. glory is a teacher at the school we're volunteering at, and she's really wonderful. she's from moshi, which means to some extent she's an outsider in zanzibar too. she invited chris and i to her house yesterday afternoon to meet her husband who was at work during our last visit and hang-out on a sunday afternoon. first off, i wanted to get a present for her 5month old son, kennedy. so chris and i thought we would go to the market mwanakerekwe, which is somewhat close to her house. plus we'd been there last week, with no problems and it's not full of tourists. so we walk to the dalla dalla stop and are immediately approached by a man who is obviously not quite straight in the head. recognizing this was somewhat of a big step for me because at one point during my trip here last time i had a long conversation with a man who spoke English perfectly but exactly like an action movie trailer narrator, quite disconcerting, but I found out later that he’s quite out of his mind and that that was obvious to all the Tanzanians but for some reason this didn’t register with me. Anyway…we were approached and this guy was swaying about uncomfortably when we were rescued by the nicest dalla dalla I had ever been in, lovely. Maybe it was because it was so comfortable and nice that chris and I stayed on it past the market, down the road until we were quite a distance, when our “shusha”s were finally heard. Only to board another dalla dalla to get back to the market. After a successful trip to the market, we travelled to glory’s house. Her husband is a really nice man, who took us to the store down the street to buy us sodas and snacks and chat us up. After hanging-out and snacking for a while Michael, glory’s husband, put in a dvd of multiple jean cleaude van dam movies, of which we were to choose. Reluctantly, we chose one and watched while we ate lunch. At one point there was a sex scene which resulted in the most uncomfortable 3 or 4 minutes of my life. No one was looking at the screen, we were all trying to concentrate very hard on our watermelon eating, ignoring the pornographic sounds coming from the tv. Quite uncomfortable.

Anyway, chris and I are pretty much continuing our life here in Zanzibar, making some more friends, learning to cook, etc. there are tons more involved stories that I could tell, but I don’t want to test the patience of my lovely friends and family. Love. annie