weekend adventures, or lack thereof

I have a roommate now! She moved in last Thursday night, at 9:30pm. Could she have picked a stranger time? Not really, but that's ok.
Her name is Irene, she is from the Northwestern area of Tanzania, studies economics, and has a penchant for watching foreign soap operas. Her favorite one is from the Philippines, and has some rather horrible English dubbing in it. She gave me a quick synopsis of the 'action' and told me that I will grow to love the show. I think she's crazy.

Friday night we went to the FOED Banquet. (Faculty of Education). Banquets here aren't dress up and go sit at a table and eat good food events. They are dances that often involve copious amounts of alcohol. Apparently each of the faculties at the University sponsers on during the first few weeks of school. So we went, but my roommate wanted to make sure we wouldn't miss anything so we left at 8:15. We got there and no one showed up until 10, and the dancing didn't get started until 11. So we sat around a lot. I asked Irene if they have parties like this often. She said no, only during the first few weeks of school. I asked her what people do on the weekends later in the year. She said that they study. So who knows, my weekends could get really boring.

Anyways, the dancing started, and it reminded me a lot of Roscoe's. One major difference is that the guys started the dancing. They were hilarious, and a little ridiculous. Most of them were horrible dancers. One interesting thing was that they weren't afraid to dance together in groups. They didn't really touch at all, but still, for the first hour it was mostly just men dancing. One of my favorite ones to watch was when they would stand in a circle, put their arms around each other and hop in one direction. Very funny. I didn't dance much at all. Irene tried to get me to dance with someone but I didn't want to and escaped. There was a live hip-hop performer later, which was cool. I've actually heard some of his music before, so that was helpful. His name is Dulley Sykes and he sings a popular song (in Kiswahili) about a girl from Kariakoo (an area of the city of Dar). I got home around 2am, and was asleep by 2:30.

Saturday I went to Mwenge with Amanda because she wanted to buy a radio. We walked around for a few hours before heading back to the University. In the evening I went to a Bollywood film called "Munna Bhai 2." The plot is basically that this thug falls in love with a woman after hearing her voice on the radio, fixes a radio quiz show on Gandhi to meet her, he has to cram for 3 days in a library with every book written on Gandhi in it and starts hallucinating Gandhi. Gandhi makes him turn is life around, he is involved in a non-violent protest, and needs to reveal his lie to the woman. It was pretty great, especially the hallucinating Gandhi sequences.

Sunday I slept in. Then I went to the computer lab to type journals for my program. In the afternoon I went to the library and read a sociology book on how crime is defined. My life really isn't exciting. I went to dinner, then came back to my room, read, and went to sleep.

I will need to find more entertainment for the weekends I think. I am going to go through my guidebook and make a list of things in Dar to do.