Culinary adventures?

Some (oddly, all food related) scenes from Tanzania so far:

Don't trust the innocent looking face!

 This monkey, Chelsie, far from being the gentle vegetarian she appears to be, in fact attempted to ingest me yesterday. She lives at Lukundane and was watching one of my jewelry classes, and I went over to say hi. She hopped onto my shoulder, attempted to nibble on my necklace, and then, when she realized it was inedible, decided that biting my neck might help. As you can imagine, it didn't. But she didn't break the skin so I'm probably not rabid and not going to die a horrible inevitable death. So yay?

Chips mayai

 This is a common dish here in Tanzania, known as chips mayai, which is, in fact, a french fry omelet. How can you not love a country that has a french fry omelet as one of its primary dishes?

Banana wine. NOT delicious.

 Turns out banana wine is not delicious, it is painful. I learned this on my very first night, when, coincidentally, I believe we were eating chips mayai.

Should I put it in the front or the side of my mouth?

 OK, this one requires explanation. Yesterday we discovered the joys of sugar cane. Unfortunately, it was through a small chunk that Giftie had left behind, at the end of the stalk which then required extensive chopping to process into edible form. The tip, in fact, had to be almost completely rounded and most of the outer covering peeled off, leaving it a bit... interesting looking. Then we were told to bite it and suck out the juice. It actually wasn't until I took this picture that any of us realized how incredibly, incredibly inappropriate it appeared.

Alien eggs and ugali hangman

 To be fair, we were a little desperate for culinary stimulation at that point. Dinner was ugali, a national dish, which is basically cassava flour and water, and it. is. terrible. Tomato sauce doesn't help, peanut butter doesn't help, nothing helps. Instead I used it as a medium to convey my feelings about the situation. Also we ate passion fruit from the market, which are seriously alien eggs. Back me up, anyone who has ever eaten a passion fruit? If not, make it happen immediately. You crack open the   kind of foamy weird layer inside the shell, then suck out individually wrapped seeds, kind of like pomegranate, but green and gelatin-y and thoroughly disturbing in every way. The weirdness of the entire experience makes me wonder seriously about the people who say it's an aphrodisiac, and what on EARTH else they consider sexy. Probably sugar cane.

Back roads of Tengeru

 This isn't entirely food related, but Christian and I tried to take a shortcut back to our house through the back roads of Tengeru and ended up lost in a banana field. That was kind of cool. We figured it out eventually, having a large mountain to orient oneself by is definitely helpful. On the way, though...

This wasn't an action shot.

In someone's back yard in the middle of this weird banana field we came across two dueling roosters. Except they weren't fighting. They were having a very serious, puffed up staring contest that went on for at LEAST five minutes, because that's how long it took us to get tired of watching and giggling. The house owner came out and was a little confused until we pointed at the roosters, at which point she also laughed. Aggressive, bowing, tae-bo chickens are funny in any language.