[on Tanzanian dinner table hygiene, from Excerpts from "Dark Star Safari"]

     In addition to their title of world's most frequent greeters, Tanzanians surely also own the distinction of world's greatest hand washers. Every Tanzanian restaurant, from high class to highly fly infested, is bound to come equipped with numerous hand washing stations, either fixed, in the form of sinks or plastic barrels, or mobile, in the form of table-side kettle service. These stations often have queues of a few people lining up for them, for when Tanzanians get ahold of a bar of soap and some hot water, they're unlikely to move until their hands are dirt-free on a molecular level.
     They are also highly protective of their clean hands. If you offer a handshake to a Tanzanian sitting at the dinner table, he or she is likely to offer you only their forearm to shake in return, with their clean hand curled protectively away from your dirty one. Two clean-handed greeters just simulate a handshake by touching forearms together. 

[on gender balance, from Excerpts from "Dark Star Safari"]

     Tanzanian society is rather male-dominated, and injustices towards women all too common. In the extreme (but not uncommon) cases, women whose husbands have died are chased from their home by the deceased man's brothers, who refuse to let a woman of another clan own land which they view as rightfully theirs. Constitutionally, the woman should inherit the land, but traditional mindsets are so engrained in the people and in the courtrooms that this rarely occurs.
     Perhaps even more troubling, for every country has its sexists and bigots, are mainstream attitudes towards the role of women in society. The prevailing attitude around here, of men as well as women, is that women's jobs are to cook, clean, and procreate--all at her husband's behest, of course. When I tell people I'm not free on Saturday morning because I have to clean my clothes, a common return comment is "Why don't you get a wife?" Tellingly, the Swahili phrase kupata jiko means both "to get a kitchen" and "to get a wife".

[on Tanzanian resourcefulness, from Swahili Proverbs]

     With a rather threadbare economy and an adeptness at using simple raw materials to fix and create things, Tanzanian society is loath to throw anything away that could possibly, somehow, be of use. Bundles of plastic bags, compressed and tied tightly with string, are turned into soccer balls for children; used automobile tires and strips of rubber are fashioned into very affordable sandals; discarded scraps of sheet metal are collected, snipped and welded back together to form little kerosene lanterns. All local treasures made with discarded trash.

     When the monkeys realized they were about to be ambushed, they made a dash for it through the treetops. All hell broke loose as the chimps in the trees and on the ground began giving chase, thundering by us only meters away, screaming and yelling with unimaginable ferocity, ripping down small trees and branches in frightening displays of strength and quickness. These were scary animals, but today was not their day. The speedy colobus monkeys managed to escape unscathed, as, narrowly, did my underpants.

[on some changes around town, from Technology]

     Since I've been back, I've noticed a few changes around Moshi. For one, they've replaced the cooks at my local outdoor patio bar with some new guys. Meat cookers are a fairly crucial factor in the overall quality of a local outdoor patio bar, and these guys serve up some quality beef. They're ornery, and sometimes a little slow, but as long as they're serving up the mouth-watering meat hunks, I'm not complaining.
     Another noticeable change has been the weather, which has become drastically colder over the past month. I would guess that it averages 20 degrees nowadays, but drops sometimes to around 15. In comparison to Canadians who start wearing short sleeved shirts on that first day in mid-March when the temperature hits 10, I can't help but chuckle at the sight of Tanzanians walking around in Balaclavas at 20.
     Briefly in other news, the frightening beard I grew in my final term of university made its glorious return during my 5 weeks away. However after a week back in Moshi, I decided to remove it when too many people around town started calling me Yesu ("Jesus"). Now it's back to plain old mzungu.

     Another significant challenging aspect of Swahili: noun classes. Any native English speaker who has learned French or German (among others) is aware of the headaches caused by these languages' use of noun classes: 'le' and 'la' in French, 'der', 'die' and 'das' in German.
     Think French (2 noun classes) and German (3) are hard in this respect? In Swahili, by my count, there are no fewer than 7 noun classes. That's right, 7. That means whereas in French you must tailor words to agree with either a masculine or feminine subject (grand/grande), in Swahili you have at least a half dozen ways in which you tweak your various parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, possessives, etc.) depending on the noun class of the subject. In addition, the plural form of many of these nouns classes requires a different set of changes than the singular.