Random snippets from the week...

...although if there is one thing I have learned this week, it's not to send emails out late at night! Somehow in my exhausted state I must believe that my email recipients will know what I was thinking when I wrote the email... not! And thus resulted a rather frustrating one week of an important research project here hanging in the balance; at least some denouement today, though I will say, still a bit frustrated. Oh well...

My vodacom adventures continue... so I texted my buddies a few weeks ago and got Andy a modem in record time, 10 days! More recently, I texted my voda friend Muta again -- who sometimes flirts with me over text, 'Wow, Malavika, your swahili is nzuri sana (very nice!) -- to see if our voda modems would work in other African countries. This was a question for none other but the Vodacom Moshi manager and even warranted a phone call, not a text response -- and if you've ever been in a low-resource country, you know that everyone communicates via text only because it's so cheap!! Turns out my voda will not work in other countries... but in the process, I heard Voda's hold music, which is this corny Swahili jingle... and it was so funny that I asked Muta if he knew it, which he did and promised he would sing it next time we met :)

I'm still finding it difficult to stay abreast of world news and U.S. happenings -- health care debate? I've got no clue what's happening on that front. At least podcasts keep me busy and entertained. Here's are some funny pick-up lines and good responses from my favorite podcast of the week. I'll buy you a special tanzanian present if you can identify which podcast they are from...

guy: haven't i seen you some place before?
girl: yes, that's why i don't go there anymore

guy: is this seat empty?
girl: yes it is and if you sit there, this one will be empty too!

guy: your place or mine?
girl: both. you go to yours, i'll go to mine.

guy: so what do you do for a living?
girl: i'm a female impersonator

guy: i would go to the end of the world for you
girl: but would you stay there?

I've been listening to Tanzanian radio lately, mostly because Mama Rosie turns it on and I work from home every so often. She listens to a gospel Swahili channel (which I figured out because every song is about damu and mungu -- blood and god!) that also recites news from 1pm to 2pm. The news hour is hilarious on multiple fronts --

(1) The same news is read 3 times, from 1-1:20, 1:20-1:40, and 1:40-2. Each 20-segment alternates between a man and a woman reading the news, but it's seriously the same news!! How can I tell? Because although I feel rather cut-off here, even I know that nothing is so dramatic is happening that Benjamin Netanyahu, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Angela Merkl, or Hamid Karzai are worth mentioning 3 times in 1 hour. Or 'Barack Obama' and 'nuclear reactor,' which by the way, in case you didn't figure out, is Swahili for 'nuclear reactor.' :)

(2) Each repeated news segment is punctuated by music. Keep in mind this is the gospel channel (Bariki confirmed this). So far, the transition music has included Tupac's California Love, Beyonce's Single Ladies, Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing, and Madonna's Holiday. Don't worry, I'm making a list.

Well it's fitting I should end this tired post on my favorite streams-of-consciousness sentence of the day. From a message sent by Sarah, who left Moshi last week: "Just got back from Kroger and was really surprised how little of the food actually looked appealing. Where are all the super cheap delicious vegetables?"

Me: "heehee, they were cheap and delicious until someone decided to freeze them spray them with chemicals transport them halfway across the world then create artificially colored bags so the grayish dry tangerines look too-good-to-be-true-but-you-fall-for-it bright orange in the store. dont you think? :)"

And with that, goodnight to a long week and a relaxing weekend ahead!

Don't forget to send in the name of the podcast from which the pick-up lines originated! :)