More on Tanzania: Arriving at Zanzibar
Posted By Sika on July 23, 2008
First off, it’s not pronounced TAN-za-nee-a. Or Tan-ZANE-ee-a. It is pronounced Tan-ZAHN-ee-a. This means, that in an effort to appear to be culturally sensitive I sometimes say one, sometimes say the other, sometimes say a weird amalgam of all three, and sometimes make noises I didn’t even know were humanly possible, although they certainly aren’t intelligible. I only mention this fact in case you, like me, are obsessively, well, obsessed about saying things the way the people who originated the words say them. Unless it sounds weird. Or overly pretentious. Or is just too difficult. Or is British.
We arrived in Zanzibar and went through “immigration” (because y’know, we had left one country to go on a boat to travel to, um, the same country. So of course we needed our passports checked and all that. But hey, at least it means I have another Tanzania stamp in my passport). We had booked at one place, mentioned in the guidebook we had, but other PCVs had recommended another place, Haven Guesthouse, so we stopped at information and had them call and see if Haven was available. It was, so we went there. Erin had gone to the other place we had booked and said that was really nice, too, and the beds may have been less lumpy. But anyway. Jenn had given us prices and what she had been able to bargain down to, but we didn’t bargain much because, well, lately it just makes me feel bad.
I believe in bargaining. I don’t like paying the azungu price, and I don’t think it’s beneficial. I know people who say, if we’ve got the money, shouldn’t we spread it around and just worry about if the price is affordable to us? And I understand that argument and on some level agree with it, which is why I pretty much never bargain hard. But the thing is, if we pay too much, eventually we raise the prices for the other people who can’t convert into dollars or pounds to make prices sound cheap.* What with inflation and the increase in food prices,** and all that, I feel a lot more like bargaining hard is likely to cheat the person with whom I’m bargaining. So we didn’t get some of the excellent deals that other PCVs have gotten.
*In a (small, overly simplified) way, it’s sort of like how the Californians moved in and decided that Seattle houses were worth, to them, twice what they were going for. Eventually, as a result, Seattleites ended up getting priced out of Seattle.
**Eggs have gone up in price by 75%; chickens have gone up 25%; peanut butter has gone up 40%; ngaiwa has gone up 50%. Since I moved here in September. Most of the price changes have been in the last 3-4 months, though.
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