TAN: Vodacom Premier League

Was up at 6 a.m. and worked on the computer until it was time to head to the office around 9:30 a.m. We found Maina at the office and the Internet connection up and creeping along. Got some emailing taken care of and headed out for lunch. The Royal Chef, our favorite out of the restaurants in the immediate vicinity is still closed. Supposedly they will reopen on Monday. The management used the month of Ramadan to renovate the premises.

Shooting up in Dar es Salaam. With most people making $1 or less a day, I wonder how the average person could afford to maintain a drug habit.

Right after lunch we headed downtown so Chantal could drop a letter off with DHL. I took the opportunity to visit the music store right next door to the DHL office. Picked up a couple of Bongo Flava CD’s. They seemed a little pricey at $10 a pop for CDRs. Sandrine got a VCD of some music videos. The videos were interesting but the disc itself was poorly put together. It would be interesting to see if Maina would get better prices for not being a mzungu (European.)
We spent the rest of the afternoon at the office listening to and watching our new purchases. I posted some more photos of the Foxes train for Bruce. He has been hot for some high-res pictures since the World Travel Market show ended. When we went out on the train, the focus for us was on getting footage for the DVD, not taking still images.
We split up in the early evening. Sandrine and I headed for Shoppers Plaza to get stocked up for our impending trip to the Maasai Steppe. Chantal went to help Mwanga shoot an awards dinner for a Vodacom (a local cell phone provider) sponsored Football (Soccer) league.

The checkout lady had beautiful mehndi ( a temporary henna tattoo) all over both hands and forearms.

What Mwanga had told us would be a 45-minute event turned out to be over three hours in duration. I was a little worried that the two hours it took for Sandrine and I to get the groceries and head back downtown would leave Chantal sitting idle for quite a while. I needn’t have worried as the event was still going strong when we finally showed up. We enjoyed the really nice buffet they had set up. Right after the food, they launched into the awards. The teams were given different amounts of money depending on how they placed.

The #1 Simba Sports Club team, walked away with a a check for $25,000 and a couple of trophies. We enjoyed the live band while things wrapped up.

Mwanga reneged on his promise to let us use his functional PD150. He told us that he needed it to shoot an interview with the president of Vodacom in the morning and that he could only lend us his other PD150 for our trip to the Maasai Steppe. We explored a number of possible solutions to this dilemma when we returned home. Sandrine eventually called someone she knew at France 3 to see if they could convert NTSC footage. The verdict was positive, so we could use Chantal’s camera. This came as a great relief, as none of the other possible solutions were particularly appealing.