September 8th -Masasi

Us in our hostel in Masasi celebrating my birthday with chocolate

The next morning (my birthday) we left for Masasi. This time we weren’t on a coach bus, so we were uncomfortable in new ways. Still no leg room, but now also our butts started going numb. I made a friend, though, because the girl next to me slept on my shoulder almost the entire ride. The whole reason we were going through the rural south part of the country was to get to Masasi to see the famous woodcarvings that the tribe there makes. But, when we got there we had to figure out where we were going the next day and how we were getting there in Swahili at the bus station. This took about 2 hours because we would ask if buses went to Nangurukuru, what time, and how much it cost, and we’d get different answers from everyone we asked, but we were pretty sure there was only one bus that went on this route.

Anyway, we finally got it all worked out, so we wanted to go see the market where they sold the carvings. However, we had no idea where it was, and we didn’t have a map of the city, so we asked a taxi driver. I ended up doing all of this, but I didn’t know how to ask about woodcarvings in Swahili. I struggled for a bit, then I tried using a mixture of English and Swahili, but it wasn’t working. Finally I looked up “art” and “wood” and basically guessed at a phrase that I thought would mean art made of wood, and he understood. I was so excited that he laughed at me and pounded my fist like good job. He even said the same phrase I used back to me, which meant it was a real phrase, so then I was even more excited.

Then we just had to negotiate price. I bargained, and he said that my price was too low, that it was far, and I said he was lying, that it was not far, so he laughed and reduced the price. When we got there, I was going to ask the driver to wait for us, so when he saw me take out the dictionary, he shook his head and walked over to me to read what I was going to say. I started laughing and said “Oh, rafiki yangu! Pole sana!” (Oh, my friend, I’m very sorry for your trouble), and just like that we were friends. He pointed stuff out to me and explained what they were, and I just loved it. Stacey told him her name and asked what his was. I told him mine was Elisabeth because Tanzanians don’t understand Liz. He just decided that he would call me Eliza (Eh-leez-ah) instead. Anyway, the “market” was this little tiny shack that contained like 20 carvings… not exactly what we had in mind. At this point, we were all just laughing in disbelief.

We had read that there were two markets, so I asked if he could take us there, and he said he would. The second place had even fewer than the first, so I just asked him to take us to a hostel listed in the guidebook. On the way, we saw more carvings, so he pulled over and asked us if we wanted to look, which was really nice of him. This place was still small, but at least it had a few full shelves of carvings, and the girls seemed satisfied. I was running low on money, so I wasn’t going to get anything, but my new friend continued picking stuff up to show to me. When everyone was ready to leave, he took us to the hostel, and dropped us off. He shook everyone’s hand, and then he was like “Ah, Eliza, asante sana. Safari njema” (thanks very much, have a good trip). So awesome, I love Tanzanians.

Our day did not end there. The hostel he dropped us off at didn’t have any open rooms, so we wandered around and it wasn’t until the 5th one we tried that we finally got rooms. We were so exhausted, and hungry, so we went to find food. We sat down at a random restaurant and the girls paid for my meal, which was really nice. We walked to get some snacks for the bus the next day, and then hung out in Siri’s and my room for a while. Siri and Sara had also bought me chocolate and apple soda while we were out which I totally didn’t expect and was really excited.