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G-Man's Boring Lawyer Blog
May 24th 2007, 05:31 CEST by Gabe I'm kind of curious. |
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Topic: G-Man's Boring Lawyer Blog
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It cooled off a lot overnight and it was a bit foggy in the morning. Our sheet and pillows felt damp as is they were taken out of the dryer too soon. My wife, excited to be able to see the grounds under first light, got out of bed to see all the coffee plants. She was a bit startled to see a man out on the path, but he was a security guard to make sure no one trespassed on to the grounds. We showered and went to breakfast where we met up with a representative from Ranger Safari who reviewed our itinerary. He gave us our flying doctor cards as well as our plane tickets for the flight to the Serengeti. A key note was that the flight was due to leave at 8:00AM, not 8:30 as it was previously told to us. Due to airline scheduling we had an extra day to spend in Arusha, which proved fortuitous, as it let us explore the area and learn about it instead of spending the night and leaving in the morning on safari right away. It also gave our luggage time to catch up with us. Our plan was to visit a school and a village. We also had to include a trip to a grocery store to get toiletries that were lost with our luggage. Unfortunately we did not take any video of the village as we were afraid of using up all our battery power before seeing any animal, so we were only able to take some still pictures. I was able to get some video of Arusha when we were leaving though. We left the coffee lodge and were going to go to the school first since it was the last day before summer holiday and they had tests to take in the morning before being dismissed. However, the guide for the N’giresi village was already at the safari operators so we changed plans to go there. Our driver took us to pick up the guide and we had our first taste of daylight city driving. It was a lot more crowded in the morning than it was when we arrive at night. There were a lot more people than I expected. Driving was an exercise in controlled chaos as the road was a jumble of foot traffic, trucks, overloaded buses, and the occasional man pulling a cart. My wife noticed that there were no traffic lights or traffic signs, except for the odd arrow pointing to a destination. The smells of the various exhaust fumes combined into one noxious mess. We were able to see how poor the region was. I had expected to see some areas of wealth interspersed with the poor, but there were none. The odds house or market looked kept up, but the majority of it were shacks with corrugated steel roofs. There were no sidewalks in the poorer area, simply dusty dirt between the road and their front door. Arriving at the safari compound we were meet with another gate and guard that let us into a beautifully manicured compound. You would not have guessed the poverty that existed on the other side of the wall. We picked up our guide, John, who rode shotgun to the village. We made our way back onto the streets of Arusha and they navigated to a dirt path that I would never have guessed was a road. The village is near Mt. Meru and is on the rainy side so it was quite lush. This past season was very wet and they had a bounty of coffee and banana. Alongside the road was a market. The guide explained to us that people don't have refrigerators and would come to the market 3 times a day to get their food supplies, assuming they could afford it. We passed people riding/pushing bicycles coming down the hill to sell milk from their cows. Even at low speeds the road tossed us around the 4x4. The locals call it the east African massage. We passed all sorts of people and shacks along the road on our way up. The children were excited to see us, waving their hands and alternativly yelling "Jambo" (hello!) or "mzungu!" (white people!). Their genuine surprise and excitement made us feel like we going off the beaten path to experience the road less traveled. It took us 20 min of rumble and tumble to get to the village proper. We first went to the village elders house (for lack of a better term, I call him the village elder. Better than chief I think). He appeared to be the richest man in the village and was the first to get electricity two years ago. Inside they had a TV and a Sony mini system. He met with us and told us that they use this program (it cost us $25 each) to fund their schools and were able to build a secondary school with the money. Instead of 20% of the kids continuing their education, the new school ensured that 80% would be able to do so. We had some coffee and left with John to go on a walking tour of the village. The tour took us about two hours. We saw a house under construction using the traditional methods of a wood frame with stone that would be covered in mud and dung. We learned that most of the families practice subsistence agriculture. There were some Masaai people that married into the village and brought their ways with them (I think the dominant local tribe is the Warusha). They were easily identifiable by their roundoval houses. We met young children covered in mud that were excited to see us. They talked to us (through our guide) and one kid grabbed my hand and held it as we walked. I took a picture of them and showed them themselves. Our guide told us that it was probably the first time that they have seen themselves. They all crowded around me as I showed them pictures of their village. We waved goodbye to the kids and made our way to the primary school for the village. We were told that, like the other school we were to visit later, they had year end tests before being dismissed for the year. They kids were outside playing soccer with a 'ball' made out of tightly wadded up bags. Others were milling about talking and looking at us. I felt weirdly uncomfortable with my camera draped around my neck in an ostentatious display of wealth. I discretely took it off. All the kids wear uniforms. We met with a teacher and talked a bit. His English was OK, but we soon ran out of questions to ask. We were shown a typical class room and it was small with simple wooden benches. We were told that they typically sit 4 students to a bench. The walls were bare save two posters and there were a couple of holes in the ceiling. Our visit over at the school we started on our way back to the elders house. We took a different path and stopped at one of the Masaai style houses in the village. We were invited inside to see the simple way in which they lived. It was a sharp contrast to the elders house that we had seen. Light came from a simple kerosene lantern that couldn't have been more than two candle power. In the house they keep their cows at night and the calves until they are three months old. This house had one calf inside of it. It was quite warm due to the lack of ventilation. They sleep on cloth over some simple mats. A fire is made in the middle of the house for cooking. They had some modern steel and plastic pots for food and cooking, but nothing extensive. Maize is a staple that they use in most every meal. This particular household was part of a polygamy family. The husband had another wife that had her own roundoval house next to the one we were in. In addition there was a traditional framed houses next to the roundoval that housed that wives respective family. We made our exit and we went back to the elders house. Before going inside John showed us the beehive they keep for honey (some type of stinger-less bee) and how they make methane to cook with. A program from Univ. of Co. (or Ca. I forget) came over and showed them how to use the cow excrement to ferment in the ground to make methane. Inside the house John showed us the "stove", a simple burner that looked more like it was used for camping or science class than something inside a house. It was very crude to us, but by their standards very advanced for the people in the village. We met the elder again and shared our experience with him. He had a great big smile on and was eager to hear about what we thought of the village and what we saw. We told him and he was pleased that we enjoyed ourselves. He also asked if we would like to donate some money to the school fund, which we did. It's hard to say no, so we gave (another) $40. We left the village going down another road that was bumpier than the one we came in on. We dropped John off at Ranger Safari when we made our driver go to a store so that we could get some supplies. First we had to go to a Banque de Change. I have no idea if I got ripped off or not. I gave them $40 and got 5 10,000 Tsh bills. In Arusha there is a large UN presence thanks to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda going on in the city. Thanks to that and all the money they bring into the area, plus some ex-pats, a nice modern supermarket was built. We went in, past the now obligatory guard, and found a store that reminded us of home. It had a dozen aisles with separate sections for dairy, meat and produce. We also found punk college kids on 'holiday' that reminded us too much of home. We picked up our supplies and checked out. The items were cheap, a tube of toothpaste cost only 1,000 Tsh (less than $1), but I wondered how long it would take the cashier to make as much as we bought (about 16,000 Tsh). [sidebar] For either culture or economics you'll find that the local population doesn't believe in deodorant/antiperspirant. Sometimes you'll get a strong sniff that you'll feel like passing out. Just hope that it won't be your server at dinner time. [/sidebar] We went back to the hotel for lunch and took the time to freshen up with our new goods. We had time for a brief nap before our afternoon excursion. We were due to go to a school in the city, but since we had already seen a school at the village and there would be no kids there to see, we drove around Arusha and saw the sites. We went by the Rwanda tribunal courts and saw the Arusha clock tower (halfway between Capetown and Cairo), as well as the monument to Julius Nyerere's failed Ujamma program. We went to a post office to get some stamps to send postcards home. We thought the kids would like it and it would be a neat race to see if we got home first or the post cards. The driver showed us the main open air market that the locals use for their shopping, as opposed to the supermarket we went to earlier. For whatever reason he thought it would be a good idea to go for a walk through the market. So we go out and everyone wants to talk to us and follow us. They asked us in their rudimentary English where we from and I instinctively say, New York*. As soon as I say it I realized I said that I must have been saying to them, "I have a lot of money, let me buy anything from you." Butchers we passed in stalls hanging shanks of meat wanted to sell to us. One vendor tried to sell us spices, as if we needed them. We made our way through the market with some hangers on and others just staring at us slack jawed (my wife said she felt 'eye raped') as we walked though. To say we felt uncomfortable was an understatement (I wonder if this is what celebrities feel like?). We're probably better for doing it, but it really removed us from our comfort zone. We got back into the Ranger Safari 4x4 thankful to be inside with our safety. It was nearing 5:00 so we went back to the Coffee Lodge and bid our driver good bye (and a $10 tip for the day). We went to the bar and wrote out our postcards and snacked on cashews (these were awesome) and drinks. I had a 0.5L bottle of Kilimanjaro beer, and my wife had some wine. We went back to the room and freshened up for dinner where we had an excellent 4 course affair. The only thing marring the evening was an annoying Norwegian family at a table near us. After dinner we were pretty tired and went to sleep right away. I was startled awake with a phone call from the front desk to find out that our luggage made the flight from AMS and was at the front desk for us to pick it up. I went out and a couple of the security guards brought it back to our room. Soon my wife and I were back to sleep, excited to be going out on safari tomorrow where lions and elephants awaited us. [sidebar] In Africa there is no shortage of manual labor. Someone (or two) is always waiting to help with your bags and take them for you. If you go bring a lot of $1 bills. We brought 50 and we ran out of them the last couple of days. [/sidebar] Part III to be continued... * whenever we travel abroad we tell people we are from NY. It's easier than explaining what NJ is, and we're close enough to be true, except that one time we were in FP and some guy from the states asked us where we were from, say NY, and it turns out he was from Staten Island. |
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Nice, Cheesy. Thanks again. You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religions. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. --Aldous Huxley
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Great posts. More about the food please. Actually, the liberalism of the media - as a general thing - IS a major fallacy. What the media is, is a whore. -LP Johnsen Family
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More about the food please. Unfortunately I don't think there's more to tell. For lunch that day my wife order a pizza (I think this was chicken and avocado) and I had a steak and egg on a baguette with fries. The food they serve tourists is all western so it's not some great food blog that Italy might be. Our driver guide (the one we spent the week with on game drives) said that there are about 120 tribes in Tanzania, and while they are slowly integrating (with the Masaai the most resistant), there's no one type of cuisine you can point to and say, that's Tanzanian cuisine. |
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We made our way through the market with some hangers on and others just staring at us slack jawed (my wife said she felt 'eye raped') as we walked though. To say we felt uncomfortable was an understatement (I wonder if this is what celebrities feel like?). We're probably better for doing it, but it really removed us from our comfort zone. Not to divert this into my own hippie political idealism (though I guess I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway), but i think all people should have at least one experience like that, one where they're the extreme minority. A lot of people are, if not all of their lives then most of it, surrounded by people who look like themselves, live like themselves, and act like themselves. It's a humbling thing to go through, and I really think that if people had that experience, and were intelligent enough to transpose those feeling and thoughts to other people and situations, that the level of empathy and compassion of the race as a whole would increase and make our disagreements more rational and informed. |
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Oh, if it wasn't clear when I say "race" I intended to say "human race". |
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The only thing marring the evening was an annoying Norwegian family at a table near us. Details. I watched Aliens, and I didn't even get a lousy t-shirt.
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Oh, and are you going to post photos? I watched Aliens, and I didn't even get a lousy t-shirt.
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No much details on the Norwegians, really. I felt the dining room could be romantic for a couple, but these bozos were making a lot of noise and it was annoying. My wife has better ears than me and may have heard something in English that would have been cringe worthy, but I don't remember. On lady was pretty loud and getting louder the more she drank. I'm going to post photos and video clips. I don't have all the photo's online yet and have to figure out how to export the video clips to be uploaded. I'm going the post the photos at the end though, when I'm done blogging. Future blogs won't be so long, I think. I may combine the parks we visited into separate posts so the next 6 days of my trip may be in 3 posts. Or maybe not, I don't know where this train is going to take me. |
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[Hulka] Chris Benoit and family found dead. [/Hulka] |
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Whoa. I just don't get how someone can think he has the right to decide his family should die along with him. There have been several (I think up to 7) similar cases in the Netherlands over the past few years, one happened pretty close to me. It's just unsettling to think about it. And there used to be a way to stick it to the Man. It was called rock 'n roll, but guess what, oh no, the Man ruined that, too, with a little thing called MTV!
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When I used to watch wrestling I thought Benoit was pretty good. What a fuck, though. A similar thing happen here a couple of days ago where a father drowned his two kids before killing himself. |
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But you should have put it in the sports thread, to kept it all in one place. |
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If I ever off myself, I'll be sure to take you guys with me too. |
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How would you ever manage that? "…a four-dimensional real vector space equipped with a nondegenerate, symmetric bilinear form."
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Internet gun. They've been working on it so long it must be almost ready. Game Developers: Don't forget the zombie monkeys.
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Did you not see? The internet gun is fully functional. I don't have a link handy so go find it yourself. |^^^^^^^^^^^^ |||__
| こんにちは | ||'|"\,__. |_..._...______===|=||_|__|...,] (@)'(@)"""*|(@)*(@)*****(@) |
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It's being kept under lock at Area 51. 2005 TOTY 10000 badge winner and proud carrier.
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Because y'all are lazy. http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/islamic_world/articles/2007/wafaa_bilal |^^^^^^^^^^^^ |||__
| こんにちは | ||'|"\,__. |_..._...______===|=||_|__|...,] (@)'(@)"""*|(@)*(@)*****(@) |
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In the time of the Pharaohs, royalty and other members of the nobility who died would have their internet trolls buried alive alongside them to keep them company in the hereafter. |
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Maybe that would explain why the dynasty died out |
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What does RTB stand for, in the context of torrenting an album that hasn't been released yet? Horrible song of the nonce: Left Behind
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radio transmitted broadcast? ride that bastard? random terrabyte bounce? rockin' that bitch? running through bushes? "Testiculos habet et bene pendentes" — "He has testicles, and they dangle nicely."
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Ripped Too Badly? "Games are not novels, and the ways in which they harbor novelistic aspirations are invariably the least interesting thing about them." - Steven Johnson
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#688 by Shadarr What does RTB stand for, in the context of torrenting an album that hasn't been released yet? I assume it means ready to burn, ie, an ISO or some other disc image type thing, instead of say, a folder of mp3s |
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I go to Hugin for my warezing jive lingo. |
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I blame roids (duh). A friend of mine was on Prednisone for a rash and had a psychotic breakdown in a Starbucks and started threatening to kill everyone there. A cop happened to walk in, and recognized the physical effects of his abnormal reaction (beet red face, veiny neck, dialated eyes, etc.) and arrested him and brought him to the hospital for treatment. He's lucky the cop knew what was up, or otherwise he'd have possibly died; he went into shock later, and needed even stronger drugs to bring him back to reality. He was permanently affected; his personality has never been the same. He couldn't handle stress or loud noise anymore, so he changed his career and moved into a quiet podunk town. With the cocktail Benoit was chugging, I could see going as far into evil nutjob as he did. |
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I assume it means ready to burn, ie, an ISO or some other disc image type thing, instead of say, a folder of mp3s Nope, it was a folder of mp3s. I've found a lot of other torrents with it in the name, but nowhere explaining what it means. Maybe it's just a release group. Horrible song of the nonce: Left Behind
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Hrm. Ah well. |
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RTB is a release group. |
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Really Tubby Bastards |
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That's the last time I place my faith in Hugin. And he sounded so right. |
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Would you trust Hugin on porn? Then why would you trust him on warez?* People need to stick to their core competencies. * Actually, I could sort of see this because Hugin is such a music nerd. But I think that goes hand in hand with not actually pirating music. |
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Actually, I would trust Hugin on pr0n. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in
"I'm not sure it's possible to make a "subtle" jab at Matt's writing ability." - Ergo |
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Hey, my taste in porn is excellent! Swing and a miss on the RTB thing though. |
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That sucks. I was hoping it would tell me whether or not the album was ripped from a prerelease CD or is some sort of shitty session recording. Horrible song of the nonce: Left Behind
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Ready To Burn, lol! 2005 TOTY 10000 badge winner and proud carrier.
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This is my first ever sig! <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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lol |
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It's a good one, Cheesy. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in
"I'm not sure it's possible to make a "subtle" jab at Matt's writing ability." - Ergo |
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Hugin's taste in porn is so tame that I could hardly call it porn. It's more like boring art that isn't very wankable. World of Warcraft is a pie eating contest where the reward is more pie.
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Seriously, it is probably all Andrew Blake-esque bullshit - at best. |
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The similarities between G-Man and Michael Smith of ESPN are astounding. |
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bago loves Andrew Blake's stuff. |
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I don't say that about Hugin as a bad thing. World of Warcraft is a pie eating contest where the reward is more pie.
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Porn that isn't very wankable sounds like a bad thing to me. Heh. |
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The thing McBain is thinking about I considered more NSFW nude photography than actual porn. |
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No need to defend yourself. I have the most boring taste ever. Playboy/Vivid/Wicked stuff is pretty much all I'm interested in. World of Warcraft is a pie eating contest where the reward is more pie.
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I thought you were into tranny stuff. I watched Aliens, and I didn't even get a lousy t-shirt.
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Oh yeah, how could I forget that! World of Warcraft is a pie eating contest where the reward is more pie.
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