Life now, version two

Well, life now has taken a bit of a turn toward the east.

We've moved from Togo to Tanzania!

So, from now on this blog will be all about our life and experiences in Dar es Salaam.

First impressions? Tanzania and it's people are lovely -- Dar is a big city which is a huge change from sleepy Lome.  There are shopping centres, plenty of huge grocery stores stocking most everything one could want. There is a huge variety of restaurants, way, way more expats than Togo and real, proper mind-numbing traffic jams.

We'll keep this blog going with the occasional tip for those moving to Tanzania.

First tip: If you're getting your visa at Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam, be prepared to wait for several hours in a poorly air-conditioned arrivals hall with no access to water or food. There are bathrooms.

There is a person, usually a uniformed police or customs official, wandering around taking cash and passports. He will deliver it to the customs officials doing the actual visa processing, you just need to find him in the crowd of people and shove them into his hands.

Hours later, once processed, a timid voice (usually of a very short and quiet) customs official will squeak out a name. This causes a crush of people to run forward, each thinking they heard their name. If unfunny things make you laugh when you're tired, hungry and overheated, it's hilarious.

Caught you!

Ther are somethings in life we can look back on and laugh though at the time they may not be very funny. Case and point comes from one of my junior high classes this morning. I had given an assignment for students to give me a blurb on who who Bob Dylan was and about the music he wrote. Today many of them handed in the assignment neatly typpictures few pictures. I was excited to see they had taken the project so seriously. then I began reading. I was very impressed with one students writing style in particular as I read the assignment. I hadn't been aware that they were able to write so well. That was until 3 assignments later I found one of the exact same sentences word for word. Then in another assignment. Being the sleuth that I am, I typed the sentence into google and wouldn't you know it the biography I found at biography.com had all the same sentences as this assignment. I then had to check the other handwritten assignments only to realize that students had copied out entire sections from the Wikipedia article on Bob Dylan. So tomorrow we were suppose to sing and get a start on the big assignment that is coming up, but now I have to spend it talking about plagiarism. *sigh* so goes life I suppose.

In other news, I had a student come up to me and ask if he could design a web site for the music department. I was thrilled of course as I haven't gotten around to setting anything up myself yet and there was nothing in place from previous years which had meant I would have had to start from scratch and with evring else going on i wasn sure how I was going to manage adding yet another thing to my plate but now all is taken care of. Since it is a project for school I will get to be his client for the entire year so if any changes need to be made or anything needs to be added, I just have to ask and it will be done :)