In this post: Boys v. girls, Traditional dancing

I apologize for the lack of pictures… my time on the internet is limited and the website is giving me a bit of grief, but I'll try figure it out by Sunday.

Had a great day today. Managed to get out for a half hour run with Jeff in the morning to start things off. We got a lot of interested looks and one or two people calling out to us, but pretty uneventful otherwise. The girls also ran this morning and the difference is apparently night and day. Alone, the girls get a lot of attention from men, although for the most part, it is simply "Habari za asubuhi" (how's the morning?) or Hujambo ('Sup?).

The rest of the day was fairly chill: we just wandered around, soaking in the city and its people. We found an awesome spot for lunch, with incredible traditional Tanzanian fare for cheap. I had ndizi bugota nyama, which means bananas with meat, in the style of the region where it came from, Bugota. The bananas were plantains, and had the flavour and consistency of potatoes (weird), but the dish was hearty and delicious. All the food here has been fantastic.

One of the highlights of the day was getting to see Susan for a little while via Skype, which put some bounce back in my step and made me realize how much I'd love to be sharing this experience with her. The internet is sketchy here, and unreliable, so it cut us off a few times and then blocked us altogether, but it was great to connect to home.

In the evening we went to an amazing singing and dancing performance at a cultural center nearby. In the lonely planet it says they do the show every Friday, but they seemed surprised to have us there, but more than willing to put the show on. Turns out that it was a private show just for us: incredible. They performed 6 or 7 traditional songs from different regions in Tanzania, complete with tribal drumming, singing and women ululating. Then there was the dancing, which was ridiculous and had us all staring somewhat embarrassingly at the women moving their hips in ways that seemed anatomically infeasible. I have no concept of the musculature required to make hips pop and lock like they do; I have a theory that their sacro-iliac joints are in fact ball-in-socket joints. At the end of the performance, they got us all up on stage to try the dancing ourselves: Epic. I'll see if I can post the video.