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On Saturday, we took a trip to the Sukuma Cultural Museum. Our tour guide may have been one of the most unenthusiastic people I have ever met. I thought that he would have had Sukuma pride; however, he was just giving us the facts as if reading them out of a book. Boring. It was strange to see the different reactions when people realized that all of the things we were seeing could easily be seen in the United States - Angela compared a lot to Hawaii and I compared a lot to the Algonquins. It makes me wonder what makes everyone really so unique....
The best part of the muesum by far was the dancing. We received a one hour show of singing and dancing from all over Tanzania, but mostly from Sukumaland (essentially Mwanza Region). For me, this showed a big difference between the genders because the men seemed to be enthusiastic and depended a lot on improv (especially during the porcupine/hyena/some other animal - the initiation dance) while the women seemed to be dancing just because. There was one lady who had a massive smile on her face the entire time, but she was just one. Out of all the dances, the last one was one of the most interesting...and terrifying. It was the snake dance and contained two live snakes. One, the smaller of the two, preferred to stay in and around the box while the larger of the snakes was provoked into jumping at people. At one point the snake began to go in our direction. Even the dancers moved out of the way. The snake was poised to attack when the guy grabbed the tail. But a lot of our group screamed and ran backwards. Dino has a pretty funny video of the situation even though he did not realize that he was recording. But it was fun anyway!
Today, Sunday, we took another boat trip into Lake Victoria. This time we did not have people rowing but a much larger one with an engine. It was not the same, but we did make it out to the open waters while we sunbathed in the nearly cloudless sky. On the way back, clouds started to come in and a breeze started to blow. It was a nice change, but it did not help the fact that I was already sunburned. Following our boat trip into the lake, we stayed at the Hotel Tilapia, one of the fanciest hotels in Tanzania, to eat. Although the food was expensive on Tanzanian standards, it was still cheap on American standards.
Back on campus several hours later, we went back to the first kopje we ever climbed to see the sunset again. It never fails to impress me. At least today it looked different because of all the extra clouds in the sky. Also today Marion and I made it to the same top-ish rock that we kept getting to. But Marion wanted to go to the real top rock so I helped her up. Getting down was just as difficult and those watching found it humorous. Following that adventure, the two of us went off to find some more rocks to climb but Dino wouldn't let us. We tried anyway when we thought he wasn't looking, but he could always see us. He told us next time, and I fully intend on holding him to his word!!!
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Tory
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keeping up the commenting tradition :)
1. every now and then i still miss dancing.. i should probably get involved somehow at penn. if i'm not too horrible that they don't let me. hahaa. 2. ah man...the lake sounds soo nice... 3. rock climbing reminds me of my vacation to canada, even though we weren't really rock climbing per say, we did a LOT of hiking and some of it was very steep.. i'll have to show you pictures someday (to explain better) if you're curious. they're amazing - the canadian rockies are gorgeous!