Our plan for Saturday was to go to the northwest part of the island to a place called Kendwa because there you can swim all day without having to worry about the tide. I went running in the morning then did my laundry and was getting ready to go when Tanya said that Jaclyn wasn’t feeling great and didn’t want to go anymore. We decided to scrap the beach idea, which was probably for the best because we were going to take a dala-dala (the local bus) up there and that may have taken three hours.
Instead, Jaclyn and I stayed home and read while Tanya went to the grocery store with Kim, who has a rental car. Tanya was gone for a very long time and I was starting to get concerned but she made it back with a lot of goodies. We just found out that $600 of food will be reimbursed per person for the time we are here and since I’ve only spent $220 during half of my time we don’t have to worry about food money anymore. Tanya splurged on cookies, chocolate cake mix, cheese, and yogurt.
In the afternoon, we went down to the pier and swam for a while. We ran into a local guy that we met in town last week and chatted with him for a bit. We told him we were planning on going to the opening night of the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) which was starting that evening in Stone Town.
ZIFF is an annual festival which has been going on for 11 years and has evolved to include movies, music, workshops and other events. 71 movies from producers in East Africa, Europe, and the Americas will be shown over the next 10 days and prizes will be awarded for certain categories. Some of the films are only 10-15 minutes long, but many of them are feature length. Shaggy is also performing on night. Some of the movies sound really interesting (too many to list here) while others sound only so-so.
We thought we’d check out the first movie, but the guy we chatted with said the opening night movie is never the best and that we should just go on a different day. We didn’t really know what to think at that point.
We had planned to go into town for dinner at a new restaurant called Lazuli’s and to meet up with Tanya’s friend, Paulo, after dinner. We took the dala-dala into town, which is always an experience. Jaclyn looked distinctly unhappy in the crowded bus but I thought it was fine. There was no one leaning over me or putting small children on my lap so I was cool with it.
Dinner was amazing! I have never had such good juice! Lazuli’s has 8 kinds of juice available and you can mix them in any way you want. I got mango and pineapple and it was blended with ice to make it super cold. It was so yummy. The best dollar I have spent so far this trip. I ordered the seafood “Bunny Chow” for dinner. It’s a small loaf of bread carved out (like a bread bowl) and filled with seafood in a coconut curry sauce. It had prawns, calamari, tuna, and octopus in it. It was so good. I was sad I didn’t have my camera to take a picture but I’m sure we’ll go back there.
Jaclyn wanted dessert but they were out of brownies so we walked around for a bit and met up with Paulo at the Archipelago Restaurant. Tanya had been texting another friend who was at the opening ZIFF ceremonies so we found out that they started an hour and a half late so we weren’t in a hurry. I was so full of dinner that I didn’t order dessert, but I tasted the two cakes Jaclyn and Paulo ordered and they were only okay. I would have been disappointed if I spent $3 on that cake. While we were enjoying dessert the movie started but by that time it was after 9:30 and none of us really felt like staying out late so we ended up just going home. There are still 70 movies to watch so I didn’t feel too bad about missing one.