Mostly I've been in the hotel, or in meetings. So, not too many impressions yet.
That said, my stint in the Congo last month has left me very inclined to be impressed by Dar. The streets -- so clean! The traffic -- it moves! The hotel -- hardly any weird smells, and no strange stains on the carpet at all!
Also, Tanzania is the first African country I've encountered that has its own bookstore chain. True, it's just four stores. And the books are new imports at Western prices (~10 for a paperback, $20 for a TPB) so they're mostly catering to expats and the rich. But still: it makes me like the place right off.
I may or may not blog about my work, but here's one thing that has come up. Tanzania's economy has grown rapidly in the last decade, but it's been the sort of growth the makes the rich get richer (and the capital city get very livable for expats) without moving most of the country forward. There have been dazzling advances in a few sectors -- finance, communications -- but stuff like agriculture hasn't changed at all; most of the country is farmers, and most of the farmers are living almost exactly the same way they did twenty years ago. Except now there are more of them.
On the plus side, they've almost totally dodged the ethnicity / tribalism bullet. (Thank you, Mwalimu.)
Oh, and the Chinese are here in a big way. We just missed the Chinese Minister of Commerce by a day. Not a big surprise; that seems to be the default in east and central Africa now.
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