Friday 6/28/13

What an adventure we had today! In the morning we went to the Maasai market. The Maasai are an African tribe here in Tanzania. They are the only tribe that I know of that still dresses in their traditional clothing as well as practices their beliefs. For the other tribes from what I can tell, they more tell what region you are from and other than that have no real bearing on how you live your life.

 The Maasai wear really cool clothes. The men carry around sticks and knives. Everyone has their ears gaged and they wear all sorts of cool jewelry through the holes.

Some men do their hair in the strangest fashion, it looks a lot like crazy hair day in elementary school. At their market they sell really cool cloths so I got some and I may make a skirt or something out of it.

 We left Morogoro today to go back to Dodoma. We went to catch our bus at 2:00 and then got on at 2:30. The busses here are sort of on a schedule but they won't leave until they are full. Our bus, the Al Mashoom, was one of the bummiest busses around so it did not fill up very fast. We didn't leave until 5:30!

While we waited on the bus the people at the station kept coming on and trying to sell us bread and bananas and perfume and shoes and all sorts of crazy things. It gets really annoying after 3 hours.

Finally after all the seats were full we started moving but then we just stopped at a gas station and about 10 more people got on and stood in the aisles! The bus made a million stops on the way so a 3-3.5 hour trip turned in to 4 hours.

 The sun goes down at 7 pm every night and as a white person it is not safe to be out after that. We knew we were going to be getting in well past 7 so we started getting nervous about getting off the bus at the bus station. We were thinking about this when all of the sudden this guy two rows up from us yells up to the bus attendants. They come back and he starts talking to them. This was all in Swahili so I just kinda had to guess what was going on. The guy sitting next to the guy who yelled for the attendants was super drunk. I think he was passed out on his seat. The attendants force him to stand up and then take off his back pack and start searching through it. Then they start patting him down. One guy gets out a flash light and starts looking at all of the seats around him. One of the guys finds what they were looking for, and from what I could tell it was a cell phone. I'm pretty sure the drunk guy stole it. All of the sudden on of the attendants slaps the drunk guy super hard. Then the other attendant and the guy who's phone was stolen just start punching the drunk guy and beating him up. The cell phone guy gets up in his seat and starts kicking him and jumping on him. It was so scary! When they felt they had done enough the attendants brought him up to the front of the bus and kept him there until they could turn him into the police.

We were all on edge after that so Boyd called a friend to come pick us up at the station so we didn't have to get a taxi. I was so glad to see him and get safely into his car when we finally arrived in. Dodoma.