Shoppers

Thursday, January 17, 2019

The monkeys came to play in our garden this morning. There were six or seven of them, mothers and babies, and while the adults stayed pretty much on the wall, the little ones jumped onto trees and bushes. I threw some shelled peanuts out on the lawn for them, but they were spooked by our gardener and ran away. They’ll likely be back soon.

Our gardener and two other men began whacking on the huge tree which provides shade for Mama Kundayo sits outside in the late afternoons. At first I was fearful that they were cutting it down; however, it turned out that they were only trimming it. Their only tools were their machetes with which they hacked off huge branches, some at least 10” in diameter. It took them at least 5 hours to get the tree in the shape they wanted. I think it looks a bit shorn now, but Maso says this tree grows out again very fast and will look full once more soon.

Late in the morning, John decided that we should go into town. Mary Lou had been repeatedly asking whether the skirts she and I had ordered last week were finished as sort of promised. John thought it would be good for us to go to Shoppers, the large supermarket which used to be Shop Rite before it became Nakumatt and now Shoppers. This seemed a wee bit odd since Shoppers is fairly far from us and out of the way if we were going to FiFi’s for our skirts. Still, I hadn’t yet been inside Shoppers and was curious. It was only after we arrived at the store that I realized that John wanted to buy samosas there. He craves them almost as much as he does chocolate, and the ones from Shoppers are excellent. (It’s owned and operated by Indians, so they should make excellent samosas.)  Once we got home, I discovered John had bought 10!

Shoppers has almost everything anyone could want, even dental floss, which I had never seen before in Arusha. The inventory was huge, and there was a whole section of kitchen utensils, where I found a vegetable peeler just like the one John had just broken while peeling mangoes.
I wavered but finally decided I would pay about $5 for the peeler so I would not cut myself all the time with a paring knife.There was also an area of bulk dry items which offered all sorts of spices, grains, and fruits. I passed on the dried blueberries but did get a small amount of yellow raisins to use in my Oatibix oatmeal.

After we had finished exploring Shoppers, we had Ray take us across town to FiFi’s. There we discovered that our skirts were not completed—no big surprise—but might be the next day. “Might be” is the operative phrase. Mary Lou keeps thinking time and schedules will be exact here, but she’s discovering how unreliable such an expectation is.

So, we piled back into Ray’s taxi and headed toward Meat King and home. It seems so odd to me to shop for dairy products and meat in a lovely big colonial type house. However, the shopping area is well laid out and the service impeccable. I ordered two more Russian sausages, some beef haché and stew meat, and a whole beef tenderloin (just over 1 kg).  While ordering fillet may seem extravagant, it costs less than $5 a pound here and is well worth it.

Upon our return to Kundayo, we tried again unsuccessfully to connect to the internet. Even my Smile gizmo didn’t link into whatever it connects to, so obviously the big overall internet thing  for Arusha was kaput. (That’s the best I can do with technical terms.) It poured rain for a while in the late afternoon, which likely added to any infrastructure problems, and we had to resort to reading to pass the time. I am currently reading “Gutenberg’s Apprentice,” which may be good; it is certainly interesting. To break up the time a bit more, I also went out looking for slugs and found dozens of them. Life here isn’t all that interesting all the time.