Sunday, 30 September 2007

In Rome

Landed in Rome at midday today and immediate thoughts...
  • the airport looks very new and somewhat design like Washington Duelles only the terminal to terminal movement at the latter is facilitated by "cars" rather than a "sky train" at the former.
  • immigration took all of 50 seconds to check me in! That's not compared to all of 10 seconds to EU nationals! Now that is what one calls efficiency.
  • met a cab driver as I walked out of the airport, quite friendly only his English vocabulary (or so I found out 10 minutes into the journey) was all of 5 words. That did not stop him from showing me at least 10 sites in the city going on and on in a mixture of Italian and French (both of which I don't speak) and all I could say is "Si"
  • the hotel am staying at has very small rooms and is quite on the expensive side but is definitely not surprising considering that all the places I have stayed at in London, Newcastle, Liverpool and Paris are almost the same size.
Am planning to take a walk and will write some more later.

Wednesday, 26 September 2007

In Dar-es-Salaam - addendum

We tried to take a photo of the sign outside the hotel

Tuesday, 25 September 2007

In Dar es Salaam

Been here since the 23rd. As usual, Dar is always an enticing place to be. A few interesting things happened between Monday and today.
  • in the company of the national archivist, we managed to visit the military archives that has some very interesting artefacts. Among the most interesting are those that were used in what is locally known as vita vya Kagera
  • unlike all the other times I have been here on official duty, this is the first time I have been joined by work colleagues.
  • one of my colleagues asked about a certain former university mate (they were together in Australia in the mid 80s) who now happens to be the mayor of the city! As soon as he heard we were in town, he insisted we go there and have dinner.
We are leaving early tomorrow morning so I need to fall asleep sooner rather than later.