Meeting friends and Shopping

---

How we do it

We started out by heading to the Tourist office, not too useful, and then we saw a sign for a FRENCH Restaurant and that meant COFFEE!!! REAL COFFEE!

We invited ourselves to sit with a couple our age, she is Hawaiian and he is from northern California. They had just spent about four days in Zanzibar at the fairly new and fairly good AFrican music festival: Doreen and David.

Within minutes, I had my notebook out taking notes; where to listen to music practice (not on weekends, unfortunately), where to eat but not where to stay.

Then, Doreen mentioned that they were thinking about the wood carvers market, about which we were totally unaware. However, I asked if they would like to share a taxi there, they would, so off we set!

The taxi wanted to wait for us, and we said Okay, but he had no idea of how I shop, so that became an issue later. You can actually see folks churning out the MANY carvings that actually we can buy at Pier One, so I wasn't interested.

However, I did come across two outstanding finds:
A story-cloth, something not usual in East Africa, but since we have a couple from the Hmong, we decided to buy it. Not much bargaining, but it was unique so I paid her price.

The other find was an antiques dealer who really had antiques. He said Just smell, you can tell that the Maasai have used this utensil for milking and for storing the milk.

Boy, was he right! Although Bill thought that it smelled nice, like cheese, it totally smelled AWFUL to me, and I could still smell it that night! Turned my stomach especially in the humid heat. We ended up buying a Maasai milking stool, milk bucket, and milk storage gourd.

While I was trying to find Bill, I noticed that a couple of South Africans were walking away with three statutes...My dealer explained that these were purchased by country folk to act as talismen to ward off the dangers of the colonials.

Also, the dealer had been sent by the Army to Moscow in the early 80's. He didn't remember the Russians fondly.

This statute we later found in Zanzibar for FOUR TIMES what we paid for it.

Taxi driver made us return RIGHT NOW, although we did stop at Scandinavian Bus Line to buy tickets to Mombassa. INformed that the bus is no longer air conditioned so price reduced by USD$2. Our friends did not fare so well, there were no buses out to where they were headed for several days. I wonder where they ended up.

We returned to the hotel and actually were able to figure out how to pack these things.

---