Arusha break-sorta?

This week is my couple of days off in Arusha to recharge, eat up the almost American style food, have no troubles finding diet soda and so on.  It is rare to get a day off during the work week/weekend as there are so many things to be taken care of especially on weekends.   So I wanted to take a weekend and half a week in Arusha to relax and do some things I enjoy.  Oh what a great plan if only it worked.  The weekends before I went to Arusha the internet was so horrible in town I was having trouble taking my continuing education tests.  I have to have my 30 PDHs for my engineering license by the end of June.  I started going through the online courses and taking the tests about a month ago so I would have no problem.  So far I have completed the studying for 5 of the courses but have only been able to complete one test.  So that got added to the Arusha weekend only the internet only lasts 15 minutes and I have to restart the test each time it resets.

So I stopped at the Nakumatt shopping center on my way in to town and was so excited when I saw party bags of m&m peanuts.  You know the ones that cost an outrageous $8 at Wal-Mart.  That bag would last me at least a month if I portioned it out.  But wait check out that price tag-84,700 TSH or roughly $40 US.  Guess no M&Ms.  They did at least have some diet soda since no restaurant in town seemed to have any this entire week.

Some of you probably saw some of the  craft work I got to do on Facebook.  I finished a crochet necklace for my mom in Clemson colors.  Unfortunately I have to show it to TRA for them to figure out the taxes I will owe shipping it out of country first.  That should be an interesting conversation when I try to explain that I made it.

I also walked down to the Cultural Heritage Center (a shop not a museum) to look for african beads to use in craft work.  Typically as  I walk locals join me and start conversations in broken English for the sole purpose of selling me something I don't need.  They can be rather pushy and never take a hint you are not interested even if you say NO! in English and Swahili.  This particular time I met a gentleman who was trying to sell me a tour service whose name was Steve.  First Steve I had met here so I told him I was not interested but let him walk the whole 3 or 4 miles with me to the center.  I got some good beads to work with and hope to use these to showcase ideas for the street kids when I get to work with them.

I also took a trip to visit Moma Gloria, the lady who sold my Peace Corp friend the knitting machine.  Mainly I wanted to say hello but also to see if she still had the carpet yarns which are very similar to our standard weight yarns in US.  I got all three colors she had and some of the no name hooks she had for working on carpets.  I showed her some of the work I had done with the previous purchase of carpet yarns so she could see what all we could do with it.  She wants me to make an animal from the yarn to see if it can be done.

As always I spent a lot of my time in Arusha looking for tools that are not available in Singida.  There were two tools still on my list for the money donated last year to buy tools.  I found both during my walk arounds.  A staple gun which was harder to find than anything.  And the find of the month was a battery operated drill with two batteries.  The corded drill's lowest setting is too powerful for some work and the  12 V battery system will allow for lower power but also for doing some minor work without having to get out the generator system.

Finally as I try to right this blog with the internet resetting on me and I have been walking around I found this of interest-not my photo by a common site here.

Everybody have a good week and I will be putting up another Conversation with Barnabas that I have been working on about two young girls I came across herding the family cows and goats.