BrainMunchie.com

We’ve been moving the past few days. Since my last post, we flew in to Joburg for a night and now we’re in Tanzania. In Joburg, the great people from the US Embassy - Ismail and Tebogo - met us at the airport and had dinner with us. It was especially great to see them again, mainly because they’ve been the best hosts AFAR has ever had. You don’t meet great people too often, but when you do, it’s such a breath of fresh air to see that there are some wonderful, genuine people still in the world.

As for the Jozi airport, Che and I got a little lost. You take a bus from the runway to the terminal and the bus with Jahah and DoronJazz left just as Che and I were getting off the plane. So we get on the next one, stand in a super long line for Passport Control for about 15 minutes, just to find out we were in the wrong place. People kept giving us wrong information and that caused us to play hide and go seek with the rest of the band over the course of about 45 minutes until two security guards were nice enough to escort us out (right after one threatened to arrest us…).

We stayed in a very upscale hotel near the airport because the flight to Tanzania wasn’t until the next morning. Over the course of the tour we’ve found out that people can tell we’re Americans almost immediately and they show attention, attention that can either be really good, or really bad. They mostly end up asking a lot of questions, and this happens to us while we’re walking down the street, in the malls, at the shows or in the hotel. So I didn’t think nothing of it when two girls at the bar starting asking questions of Jahah, BlackFist and me. To cut to the chase, it turns out they were prostitutes and they were working with the bar tender to try and “get us”. The manager of the hotel told us what was up. Story keeps getting better right?
So we fly to Tanzania and get there to find out that someone had gone through our bags. We had taken the time to wrap massive amounts of duct tape around the bags, but they got around that. Every compartment of my bag that didn’t have a lock on it was unzipped (luckily nothing was in them) and part of my guitar case was undone. To top things off we had to pay for a shuttle to the hotel (which I can’t understand because the embassy has vehicles and drivers), and the ocean stinks really bad. The smell is in everything around here, so bad that I went to the store and bought air freshener. And oh yeah, why did we end up talking to random people again and it turn out that they were prostitutes as well. Two different countries… same story. I had no idea that they worked like that.

I have to get up early tomorrow, so I’ll post pics then. The connection is too slow to do it tonight….I’m too tired to wait. Keep ya eyes open.