Hey folks, before I start a ‘real’ job (ugh, I can’t believe I just did that), I am doing a little bit of events work and blogging for one of my favorite local city magazines in town. Not that I’m biased or anything.
Check out my recent entry on…surprise! Market finds!
http://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2015/09/15/fresh-picks-sweet-summer-fruit
By the way guys, fresh raw dates are my new favorite fruit. Do these exist in the U.S.?
Before I arrived in Dar I imagined a full-immersion of local foods and ingredients. After all, it’s what I look forward to the most when I travel. It was a bit more difficult in Dar, partly due to the saturation of international cuisine in our expat neighborhood, partly due to the lack of a varied Swahili cuisines (centuries of being a trade port has welcomed influences from far and wide), and partly because the local cuisine, when you find it, isn’t always that good.
With that said, in the last year and a half I have been surprised, many times, by the simplicity and flavor of some of the local dishes here (when I find it). I can never get enough of the mangoes at this time of year, or the watermelons in late summer. I love the various spinach-like greens stewed in coconut or peanut, the peppery grilled seafood–always grilled to perfection, the beef and plantain stews, and have even come to enjoy the plain, flavorless maize paste, called ugali, that is just as much a staple starch as it is a vessel to shovel aforementioned stews into one’s mouth.
I’m also pleasantly surprised by these little guys– called Dagaa. Dagaa is usually sold dried, and are available at most local, open air markets. They can also be procured fresh, slippery and silvery, from the fish markets. The dagaa is a small, sardine- or anchovy-like fish, used to accent dishes (usually, greens) when fresh but more often consumed in dry form, either in cooking or simply as a snack. It’s not for the faint of heart, these little salty fishy chewy snacks that pack a flavorful punch, particularly when they’re in the markets in these massive mountains.
Kivukoni Oceanfront near City Centre is a lively place in town; a peek into the REAL Dar es Salaam: Where Tanzanians flood the streets, old German colonial-style buildings line the ocean front, an old painted ‘Tanganyika Swimming Club’ sign restricts intruders from its long-since popular facilities, where the Kivukoni Ferry shuttles hundreds of passengers and vehicles to and from South Beach several times a day, and where the fish market, the biggest in Dar es Salaam, has been operating for decades.
Here, fishermen in wooden dhow boats bring in their daily catch, once at 7am and again at 10am every morning, selling to restaurants and individual patrons alike. Anything that is caught in the water is up for sale, from tiny sardines, to huge kingfish, to stingray and octopus and squid, to shrimps of all sizes. Fish and crustaceans are hawked for some of the cheapest prices in town within these narrow concrete aisles of the downtown fish market.
Perhaps the most fascinating scenes at the Kivukoni Fish Market, aside from the outrageous species of sea animals that are sold (for food? fodder? who knows.) are the continuous auctions for fresh catch pulled in.
It may be hard for a common bystander to tell exactly what the circular crowd gathered around a low scuffed wooden table is doing. But give it a few moments, and one will quickly be able to pinpoint the main players in any auction: auctioneer, sellers, buyers, and money collectors. Suddenly an old scuffed wooden tabletop is transformed into a platform for exciting possibilities and tension. Much like an art auctioneer at an art sale, the fish auctioneer at Kivukoni calls out bids in monotone drone, starting at a base amount and raising in increments of 500 to 1000 Shillings. His pace is not terribly quick, but it’s slurred and it’s faster than my rudimentary knowledge of Swahili is able to decipher.
On one side of the platform-made-auction table are the sellers, and on the other side, the buyers. These women–and the buyers are almost all women–line the auction table in a seated row, firmly planted on buckets that are later used to carry their purchases home on their heads. They are the meanest-looking, most serious women I have seen in all of Dar es Salaam. Like card sharks around a high-stakes game, they sit entranced, staring from fish to auctioneer to seller and back again at the fish, and occasionally cast a brief scowl towards the likes of any one (me) who distracts this ping-pong vision of theirs. I barely see the minute notions that are given to the auctioneer that indicates bids, but it seems the auctioneer does not miss a beat.
From shrimp, to squid, to giant eel-like fish and tiny sardine-type fish, all creatures of the ocean are presented for auction. If there is a science or logic behind the auctions, I certainly haven’t figured it out. Then again, I’m not about to ask one of these women. I mean, check out the scowl on that one in the front…
Dar es Salaam’s most famous market area Kariakoo, which is so big and popular that it lends its name to an entire neighborhood. Here, pared down to Black and White:
Here are a few more (okay, ten) photos from an excursion through city centre a couple weeks ago. This city and its people are so photogenic, it’s too bad people are volatile and hostile towards cameras–most of the images I’m taking around town are shot from the hip, for fear of being verbally assaulted by a subject.
I was able to hop on a tour of Dar’s City Center yesterday, led by a friend who was gracious enough to allow me to hitch a ride with her group. It was the best kind of tour, one that pointed out significant landmarks, but more importantly, hit on key points such as: great BBQ street vendors, open-air markets, where to buy milk and butter and cheese (Dairyland, fyi), a good butcher, imported goods for way cheaper than Shoppers, a small alley market where they sell nail polish and hair products…you know, the really important stuff.
The tour not only taught me where to get some basic necessities, but also cemented my opinion that yes, getting off the peninsula is a really great, really beautiful thing.
Now all I have to do is figure out if I can find my way back to these places. While I study Google Maps right now to figure out where I was yesterday and to see if I’ll be able to find my way out there again, here are some pics of Zanaki Street market. Excitingly, it’s pineapple season, and mango season is definitely creeping in, as evident by the three varieties of mangoes at the street market yesterday!
Yes, the streets of Dar es Salaam really are as bustling and frenzied as they look. It’s amazing.