Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 0 Comment(s) | 0 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=42715] | 2006-04-17 04:33:44
 Ask Marie | Marie Spodek | Travel Blog |
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek
Ten days after I graduated from Augustana College (1965), I was in Kashmire, India, in a houseboat...preparing to teach English as a second language at St. Xavier's College, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. What a long ways from a one-room country school house in South Dakota. Less than a year later, I traveled from Bombay to Dar es Salaam on a third-class boat to visit with many of my students who had traveled from East Africa to Ahmedabad for their education... Now 40 years later, I am headed back to East Africa to visit my daughter in Uganda, the country I couldn't visit then because of a revolution/revolt/disturbance. I know that life is different than it was before. Just how different? I can hardly wait to see!
TB Code: [blogger=11874]
Status: BLOGGER
Joined on: January 30th 2006
Last Login: January 11th 2007
Blog Entries: 16
Photos: 30
Last Login: January 11th 2007
Blog Entries: 16
Photos: 30
Status: BLOGGER
Blogs & Travel Journals
by Ask-Marie, order by Date newest first.
Getting to Zanzibar We left our hotel, the Jambo Inn, about 9:00 am for the ferry to 10:00 ferry to Zanzibar. Our cabbie, Emanuel, took us there without hassle and dropped us off in front of the Flying Horse ticket office so that we wouldn't have to deal with the touts. Unfortunately the one we told him to take us to was the wrong one., their's left at 12:30 pm, so we had to walk to the Sea Star ticket office. It wasn't far, but we did have to run the gantlet of touts, pickpocket, etc. to get there. We were [View Full Entry]
Spice Farm The Zanzibar Government owns about 60 percent of the land, so this was a government farm, although it appeared that many small, village-like communities existed. Spices are fascinating, and our guide could tell us where each originated, and showed us each spice and explained its season, harvest and any required processing. Here is a photo of us at lunch. Fish in coconut sauce, green vegetable, chappati, banana, etc. Nutmeg, Mace You peel off the outer part of the nutmeg, leaving a beautiful, bright red lacy substance around the nutmeg nut itself. The red lacy s [View Full Entry]
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 0 Comment(s) | 5 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=42537] | 2006-02-22 11:19:29
Canadian Travelers
She is a massage therapist and works with referrals from doctors in the local community. He raises about 300 head of cattle, a French breed, as I recall. They travel in January, and shared info re: al... [more]
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 1 Comment(s) | 1 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=42536] | 2006-05-27 22:27:23
We only meet travelers by the way that we travel. We are in the cheaper hotels, the cheaper eating places, and the cheapest Internet places. By and large, we are in the cheaper shopping districts, since I guess that most tourists stick pretty close to pre-marked prices in the hotels or in the special shops to which they are directed. Not us! As a result, when we meet fellow travelers, our conversations usually center on where they have been, where they are going, what they recommend, and what they don’t recommend. Sometimes we see the same people from time to time. [View Full Entry]
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 0 Comment(s) | 0 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=42534] | 2006-02-22 11:08:13
By Ask Marie
February 17th 2006
February 17th 2006
Meeting friends and Shopping
Africa » Tanzania » East » Dar es Salaam
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, [View Full Entry]
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 0 Comment(s) | 4 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=42713] | 2006-03-14 16:45:54
By Ask Marie
February 16th 2006
February 16th 2006
On the Road to Dar es Salaam
Africa » Tanzania » East » Dar es Salaam
The Germans had been giving us very good money-saving advice, but this last advice wasn’t so good. We had planned on leaving at 6 a.m. or so and taking the TSC 6000 (Tanzanian shillings, about $6) bus from Lushoto to Dar es Salaam. However, they seemed to think that this would take 9 excruciating hours, stopping every village or so, so they had heard that it would be better to take a dalla-dallas(Toyota minivan) down the mountain to Mambo, and then get a luxury, express bus that would take only 4 hours, non-stop. So, we got to the bus area about [View Full Entry]
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 1 Comment(s) | 0 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=41737] | 2006-02-17 14:51:45
St. Benedicts has the BEST beds that we have slept in for a long time, including the United States (well, probably the Peninsula in Chicago is better!) We were awakened first by the Imam’s call for prayers (Islam), then the various churches (Christian) ringing their bells and then the school started banging on pans to alert the school children, we guess. At various times between 5 a.m. and 7:15 a.m., I was so annoyed with a) paying a premium for the room and the lack of water and b) realizing that we had paid all sorts of fees for our trek [View Full Entry]
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 0 Comment(s) | 0 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=41736] | 2006-02-17 14:45:27
Power Sign
I am always taking photos of unusual signs. This was posted in Kampala a few weeks before the election.
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 0 Comment(s) | 2 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=41568] | 2006-02-16 18:06:00
Monday night in Moshi Our night was pretty good. I worked on the computer hoping to post things before we left, but Bill fell asleep with his clothes on, and I didn't have the heart to wake him. The fan was on high speed, and so I took the chance that we didn't need the mosquito net, so we were reasonably cool for the night. Bill got 9 hours and I slept for 8. We tried to carry our packs on our backs, but they are really not designed for that, but fortunately, the road was smooth enough that we could [View Full Entry]
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 0 Comment(s) | 3 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=41573] | 2006-02-16 18:24:00
MUNICH in KAMPALA, UGANDA It was Sarah’s birthday, and we took her and Nate to dinner at a fast food Lebanese restaurant in a multi-storied mall. The food was excellent, especially the garlic sauce for the falafel…a pleasant beginning to a difficult movie. Bill and I saw Schindler’s List in Bangkok; now Munich in Kampala. The movie, plus my readings, seem to come together... I have been reading from Granta, an English publication, Joberg, by Ivan Vladislavic and walls: Johannesburg is a frontier city, a place of contested boundaries [View Full Entry]
Ask Marie - Marie Spodek | Read The Full Entry | Subscribe | 1 Comment(s) | 0 Photo(s) | 0 Video(s) | [diary=41570] | 2006-02-16 18:17:19