My Foot-In-Mouth Habit

I don't want to start a post by saying "Well, not much has happened since the last time I posted" as that immediately bores people. If you are already bored, I'm apologize, but also never come to Tanzania. It took two hours to get our dinner after we ordered the other night, and they only took our order after we'd been there almost an hour. The best part? They forgot two out of eight peoples' food. The real best part? We've all adjusted to life here, so we weren't surprised and no one got particularly upset. Tanzanians aren't really known for their punctuality. In fact, if a Tanzanian arrives on time for a meeting, his fellows who arrive late ask him why he is asking like an mzungu. There is mzungu-time and Tanzanian-time. They differ by somewhere between 30 minutes and a couple hours, depending on the urgency of the business to be conducted. Are you real hungry? No problem, two hours. Need to check your back account balance? Only half an hour today you lucky lion. And so on. Our teachers meetings at school almost always start late, and then run late, which is too bad, as the students just sit in the classes wondering where we are. Ah, c'est la vie.
My weekend was eventful for a change. For those of you going to see the World Cup this year (Sasha and Ivan, curse you both with a million fleas), I watched a bit of the African Cup over the weekend. As you can imagine, the competition is quite good. Aren't their 4 or 5 teams from Africa in the World Cup this year? Anyway, I went to a fellow teachers house and watched the games with them. It was funny, they thought I was completely naive as to how soccer is played. Granted, I'm not an expert by any means, but they were telling me things like "Ok, that man just shot at the goal. If it would have entered the goal, his team would get a point." I felt sassy, so I mentioned how Senegal was playing a 4-3-3 formation, and they all stopped and looked at me. Then they offered me a beer. I think I made the crucial difference with that comment. The games were good, tonight are the semis. Nigeria v. Ivory Coast, and Egypt v. Senegal. Everyone's abuzz with anticipation. I will enjoy watching Egypt play again because their coach looks like an angry Egyptian Will Ferrell. Oh yeah.
In more meaningful news, I went to a local elder's house for lunch on Sunday. It went pretty well, I managed only one foot-in-mouth. We got on the subject of traditional foods of differing areas throughout Tanzania, and one of us brought up my archnemesis- dagaa. Dagaa are a type of fish. Each one is a thin two inches in size, and is dried and sold with several hundred of its foul brothers. If you were to spend five minutes walking around any large market, the memory you would have would be of an evil smell that pervaded every nook and cranny. That would be the smell of dagaa. Now the great thing about dagaa is that once they are rehydrated and cooked, they taste just like they smell. Isn't that wonderful? No it isn't. It is the opposite of wonderful. So the elder and myself are discussing the foods we like, and I guess it must have been him that mentioned these little blighters. Well, I took my trademark stance on dagaa, using the harshest words possible to say how much I dislike it. He took it in good humor, as Tanzanians always do. Not fifteen minutes later, his wife, who had been cooking lunch for us for the last hour, arrived with ugali and, foot-in-mouth, dagaa. Oh good. Ugali is corn flour and water, thats it. It is like an awestrikingly flavorless dumpling. Its strong point is that it is like tofu in that it tastes like what you serve with it. Well, most days this is its strong point, as there are great Indian spices here. However, when it is served with dagaa, this becomes a massive flaw. For those of you who don't like trout or steelhead or some other freshwater fish due to its "fishy taste" please empathize with me here. The fishy taste of dagaa is enough to make trout blanch and transform into lobster. So not only was I stuck eating a mound of it, choking through a mound of it, sad bite by sad, hesitant bite, I had also somehow insulted the food my host was serving me. It was like a fishy-foot-in-mouth, and thats the worst of them all. But no one seemed to care, and I must not have been too offensive. The man invited me to travel with him in March to his home village for a week. It is almost a day's travel away, and I will be the first white man to ever stay there, he says. We'll see, it sounds tempting in an uncomfortable, meaningful experience kind of way. I think Calvin's father would say that it would "build character" and its only for a week. So I will probably go.
That's all I've got for now. I heard the Seahawks took second in the Super Bowl. I would have rather they took first in that particular game, but at least they made it for once. I hope all of you who went had a good, safe (ahem) time. Peace