saturday night stone town

---

hey,

i will look into a safari and the mountain climb.

last night hassan took me out on the town with his school friend and his girlfriend. we sat in the park as the sun went down in the middle of town, this is where all of the young kids come on the weekend to hang out. everyone eats ice cream and fish and drinks soda and laughs and runs around from group to group shaking hands. muslim cool kids, muslim milk not beer on the weekend and still bigger smiles then beered up youth of home. very straight forward love between hassan and his girlfriend, all of the young couples in the park are actually in love and not just holding hands or smiling, in love! very much so. we walked all night around stone town eating fish pancakes and laughing and looking at the stars, which are so bright here. his school friend carried an application that he had just picked up for a university in sweden, highest grades in his class here now he said. it felt good to be with such true straight forward people during the weekend night, weekend nights at home are only for drinking wine and forgetting everything. when everything was done i left back to bububu on the mini bus and had a long walk from the road to the beach house along a dirt path with a million stars and a half moon above.

this morning hassan again met me and took me to his aunt's house north of town, in a village that looked to be the exact one from those commercials on TV where african children are wearing dirty T-shirts and living in mud huts. but there were also young men dancing on roofs and singing and all smiling and very happy in general and hassan informed me that even though they all seemed to be old friends with each other, in fact they were often times strangers meeting for the first time on the dirt and greeting each other like old friends out of pure goodness of their hearts. his aunt cooked us some spinach and salt which was very good and we watched on an old tv his favorite band playing songs that he had a VHS tape of, the band was a group of about thirty middle aged rough looking men and woman sitting in the jungle with drums and wierd bucket guitars with a very old man in the middle howling away as a younger and thicker girl swung her hips and butt around in a sort of hoola dance, and hassan said that the old man sung : "i love you i love you i love you so much but i am afraid of your crazy bum", and this was not funny to him but it was funny to me and i felt sorry afterward for laughing. traditional zanzibar music.

hassan is helping me to find a motorcycle so that i can go to cape town. the tanzania-mozambique border is made by a river that is crossed by dug out canoe, they carry motorcycles across in the canoes for a dollar.

so we will see.

i am afraid that kilamanjaro and safaris have become a very commercial thing, a whole ordeal. but i will check it out.

love jasper

---