11 Months on the Road!

Hello, friends!
Well, after 11 months on the road, and particularly the past 3 weeks in Mwanza, I’ve come to a few conclusions about the world. I’d like to take this unique opportunity to share them with you – so sit back, and be prepared to be amused.
Conclusions number 1 and 2 come from recent experiences inspired by my “good friend” Liz in Mwanza, Tanzania. Certain activities that women often do together inspire both conclusions, and while I’m not making any value judgements about friends who suggest either of these activities to other friends, I invite you to read the following stories and judge for yourself.

Story # 1: Liz and Jess decide to get bikini waxes at Liz’s prompting. The relevance of this story to my important world conclusion will become clear -- so bear with me. In case you (like Jess) are blissfully ignorant of this procedure, consider the following analogy, designed to adequately represent our experiences:

Imagine you are a naked mole rat. As a naked mole rat (NMR), you take pride in your nudity, and over the years you’ve become tired of the maintenance of remaining naked. For, folks, a naked mole rat was not born hairless, as all other mole rats (specifically the male ones) like to imagine. They are constantly plucking unsightly hairs from behind their ears – a task made exceedingly difficult by the fact that they’re blind and lack opposable thumbs, not to mention by the excessively inadequate equipment for such delicate hair removal.

Well, one day while chatting with your “good friend” who we’ll call Wiz, she mentions that she too has become tired of the same ole’ routine. Wiz knows of a place, though, that will take all the pain out of unsightly hair removal (these are her words, mind you – or squeaks, since we’re NMRs). There are other NMRs there with years and years of experience removing hair from behind one’s ears, and the procedure is dirt cheap (pardon the pun). Many of your joint NMR friends swear by the procedure, Wiz reassures you, and after a brief moment of waffling you decide to join her at her next appointment.

Well, off you scurry to the nearest salon, where you place your orders and flop down to wait for the next available practitioner. While you’re flipping through magazines (a pointless pursuit since you’re blind, but apparently it’s what you do at this sort of place), your friend Wiz disappears behind a curtained partition with an NMR of gentle, smiling demeanor. She emerges approximately 20 minutes later, and assures you that the unsightly hairs behind her ears were successfully removed and that she will remain blissfully hairless for weeks to come, and that now it’s your turn! Excited for this simple procedure, designed to save YOU the trouble of hair removal in hard to reach places, you proceed behind the curtain with the smiling NMR attendant.

You are asked to lie as still as possible, and the attendant heats up a bowl of a mixture quite similar to honey mixed with beeswax mixed with tar. Before you know what’s happening, she has shmeared this mixture on your unsightly ear hairs (with only a few perfunctory cooling blows), has put a piece of paper onto the cooling, viscous mixture, and has RIPPED THE HAIRS OUT BY THE ROOT. Now, it’s been a little while since you last removed the hairs yourself (you’ve been busy, you haven’t been going out much, etc etc), and there are quite a number to deal with. And she just RIPPED them (THE HAIRS) OUT BY THE ROOT. And you have to go through approximately 20 more applications of this procedure, without emitting so much as a little squeak because your “good” friend Wiz didn’t seem to mind so much.

Let’s leave this analogy, because we now have enough background to understand Conclusion 1, which I informed Liz of at a retrospectively louder volume than I probably should have immediately following my emergence from behind the curtained partition, causing her to erupt in laughter. This conclusion is:

1. Prior to engaging in a bikini wax, patients must first view another woman undergoing the procedure and sign a release form indicating their willingness to continue.

We feel like this is one way to reduce the unnecessary pain and suffering undergone by women whose “good friends” convince them it’s a good idea to get bikini waxes. We also think that this should be the title of an Onion article commenting on the recent absurd abortion regulations in OK. Jess also feels like the Geneva convention should outlaw this practice as an obvious application of torture, but that’s just her.

Story #2: Liz has been living in Mwanza for the past year, and so has become aware of the great variety of activities available for any one evening’s entertainment. She has mentioned one particular activity in connection with the words “fun”, “exciting”, “dance”, “not too hard”, and “big mamma”. This activity, as you might have guessed, is Tanzanian Step Aerobics.

What? What’s that? You don’t associate Step Aerobics with any of these words? Well, perhaps that’s because you haven’t spent quite as much time in Tanzania as Liz (or Jess). Perhaps I should have been wary of her judgement after the experience we just discussed, but after 2 weeks of hearing about this exercise practice, I gave in and agreed to go. What could be so bad, I thought? Apparently both men and women participate in this activity, and it’s led by an extremely muscular 5’3” tall Tanzanian man who tends to shout sentences such as “Hakula chakula” (don’t eat food) “Hapana chipsi na kuku” (no fries and chicken) and “Hapana mafuta mingini” (not a lot of oil) -- which to me suggested that it couldn’t possibly be too difficult. Plus, Liz added, big mammas often engage in this practice, and in Tanzania big mammas are BIG – if they could make it through the 90 minutes of mild physical exertion, so could I (I assumed). Liz, of course, encouraged this feeling of capability, adding that it was “really fun” and that I should bring water in case of mild thirst.

As we drove toward Aerobics, the story started to change in ways that I was not entirely comfortable with. First, I’d have to ensure not to breathe in too deeply, due to the lack of underarm deodorant in Tanzania and the propensity of big mammas to extremely odorous sweating. Second, often times the moves would become so difficult that you’d have to stop, re-gather your wits around you, and launch back in – but everyone else would be continuing on, oblivious of the extreme difficulty you faced, because they’d all been doing this for years. Finally, she mentioned, we’d probably be the only wazungu (white people) there, ensuring that, as I tripped over my own feet, I would be the center of attention (and ridicule by the instructor, it turned out) at all times.

But we were already there, so what the hell. I paid the requisite $1.75 (I seem to have a thing about paying for torturous experiences in Tanzania), and we launched in with high-intensity stretching. Now, I managed to get placed directly behind the biggest mama in the room, who incited much yelling and pointing by the instructor-from-hell, transferring his attention to my portion of the room, where, upon realizing I was being observed, I would immediately trip over my own feet and get yelled at in rapid fire Kiswahili – or, on one memorable occasion, caused him to join me on my 20 inch long wooden step in a misplaced attempt to allow me to follow his steps – which instead resulted in my stepping on his toe and still having no idea what was going on since he was BEHIND ME. The muscle-bound midget also had a propensity for shouting “FIVESIX” and “SEVENEIGHT” at random times that had no relation at all to the number of times we had stepped over our box with alternating feet, which had the result of causing me to step on my own toes in fear when he did it from directly behind me. After about 40 minutes of this, half the class (including my big mamma) left – but my “good friend” Liz continued on, seeming to skip over her box with the ease of a winged fairy creature – and so, knowing beyond all doubt that there was no way I was going to survive the other half of the class, I continued to drag my hambone thighs up and down in exciting kicking motions, refusing to fail.

This continued for 40 more minutes, followed by a “cool down” session of high-intensity stretching, followed by my immediate collapse into a chair, chugging of a liter of water, and termination of my friendship with Liz. For, as conclusion number 2 suggests:

2. Friends don’t let friends do Tanzanian Step Aerobics. In retrospect, I should have been much more wary of anything with the same initials as TSA (notorious for forcing you to go through increasingly embarrassing, difficult, and sometimes painful procedures in the name of “safety and security”, or “fitness and health”). I was convinced I was going to die twice.

Now, lest you worry, our friendship was reinstated that evening, when Liz bought me chipsi na kuku for dinner and let me drink beer. It was delicious. Take that, angry Tanzanian Aerobics guy.

This officially ends Story #2, and I just realized that I don’t really have any other conclusions to share with you right now, which might leave you hanging just a little bit. However, lest you feel as though something is missing, I shall fill you in on my plans as-of-tomorrow-morning prior to my departure from this blog.

Tomorrow morning, at the arse-crack of dawn (6am), I board a bus bound for Arusha. This is where I was based during my semester abroad in 2007, and so I’m looking forward to a long weekend of reminiscing. I’ll be staying with, and meeting, fellow Couchsurfers while there, so it’s bound to be a good time. I’d like to take this moment to thank my recently-reinstated friend Liz and her lovely fiancé Ryan for their hospitality over the past 3 weeks – I love you guys, and your strange partiality toward suckling cats.

On Tuesday morning (most likely), I’ll take another unnecessarily early bus out to Dar es Salaam on the coast, where I will stay with another CSer for a few days before heading out to Zanzibar, the Spice Island, for a few days of R&R. I plan to meet up with some friends on the island, possibly stay with yet another CSer, and enjoy myself some fresh seafood. Following Zanzibar, I’ll head south by a yet-to-be-determined route, but probably straight down the coast to Mozambique for yet more time eating seafood (most notably lobsters, which I hear are dirt cheap in Moz) prior to making my way to (and through) S Africa.

I’d like to end this blog with another shout out to my most wonderful fellow World Traveler, WT Kirschner, who is apparently lost after trying to walk from her WWOOFing gig on a random farm in Italy to Florence. Once she emerges from this walk, I’m sure that she will have stories for us – so check them out on ekirschner.blogspot.com! Happy 11 months, Em Face – I miss you!

Love to all of you wonderful people out there! This is WT Jess, signing off. Time to go buy another t-shirt!