Enjoying Dar

 We have found Dar es Salaam a very easy and pleasant place to be - at least in the city centre where we are staying. It is very easy walking about and seeing what is going on. There are very few touts bothering us. A few of the street vendors call out, but very few. And a few people approach us using what they think is all our Swahili, since it is what most Westerners know: 'Jambo' and 'Hakuna matata' - when we know that the first is incorrect and the second unidiomatic. It makes those ones particularly easy to ignore. Mind you we have plenty of practice in not responding to street invitations, living in Edinburgh as we do and having learnt to negotiate the Fringe.

But it is more than that. It is a very comfortable place to go walking in even with the heat. (Though I think it is not as hot as Melbourne was when we were there.) There are shady pavements - plenty of trees and quite a few avenues of trees. Where there aren't trees there is still often shade as the first  floor of the building sticks out above the ground floor. Meanwhile there is a sea breeze most of the time, and it is clean. We've remarked in an earlier post about the lack of insects: not only are there few mosquitoes in the centre (we haven't seen any) but also there are hardly any flies. As we said in the previous post we have begun to count them - so far we have not reached five. Finally and most important, the people are friendly and helpful; some wonder what we are looking at but relax when  when acknowledged.

We are enjoying the architecture.We are right in the middle of the area where businesses have their headquarters and where there are diplomatic and aid missions - many of them in very new modern office buildings.

 But somehow, in between the new buildings, the Tanzanians have managed to preserve - and use - a whole range of older, historical buildings. They are all jumbled together in a way that, perhaps oddly, reminds me of Rome, though there the history goes back somewhat further.

We think that one of the buildings which is now a Lebanese restaurant and spruced up was probably a merchant building dating from pre-colonial times.  It is this yellow building.

 These are all government buildings. they were probably built in the early part of the previous century by Germans. At least that is what we guessed from the style and what Meck told us on our first market visit (a previous blog)

This church on the seafront seems to be German too.












The other thing I have enjoyed enormously has been the wonderful clothes the women - and some men - wear. So stylish, so colourful and worn with such confidence, regardless of the wearer's age or size.

I also want to note that the hijab - such a source of stereotyping of Muslims - far from being black and oppressive is worn with panache, and in wonderful colours. 

Just about everyone we have interacted with has been courteous, friendly, unpushy and quick to laugh and to make allowances for bumbling foreigners. Everyone: from the hotel staff, to restaurant staff, to taxi drivers, to the internet cafe we bought the sim card, to complete strangers.