'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

A NIGHT ON THE TOWN IN ARUSHA:

A NIGHT ON THE TOWN IN ARUSHA: Tonight is my last evening in Arusha. Gabi Gabiro, who works for Hirondelle Press Agency here, a couple of his friends, and I were going out to dinner. I'd been kind of looking forward to this, since I've eaten dinner in my hotel, the Impala, every night since I got here. So Gabi picks a place, we go there straight from a late-ish evening working at the ICTR-- and as restaurants go, this place was a huge disappointment. Food very, very late and individual dishes ranging from the passable to the atrocious.

(I don't think I'm dissing Gabi to mention this, since we all mentioned it and commented on it at length over the dinner itself.)

It made me wish I'd invited them all here. I've now sampled three of the Impala's four restaurants-- the Chinese, the Italian, and the Indian. And the Indian food here is excellent! Last night I had a chicken and spinach curry that had a lot of ginger in it-- and I ordered it on what they call Kashmiri rice. They always bring pappadums and an array of chutneys "on the house" at the beginning. Also a small salad. And after the curry, I had a marsala tea. Fabulous.

Oh dear, makes me sad just to think I could have had that again, tonight. Still, the conversation we had tonight was fun and relaxing and made the outing worthwhile.

Another good feature of Impala food is the home-baked breads they serve at breakfast. What with breads, curries, and no running, maybe it's time I leave town before I put on lots of weight.

Of course, at dinner tonight, Gabi and his friends all laughed when I said I was leaving on Air Tanzania tomorrow, since apparently AT got taken over not long ago by South African Airways, and SA companies seem generally renowned around here for aggressive asset-stripping.