Michamvi Zanzibar: Empty Santa’s Sack

Michamvi Zanzibar: Empty Santa’s Sack.
Dec 24
Christmas already?  The Earth gets around the sun in a hurry!

Spending Christmas day swimming in bathtub-warm turquoise blue waters is not such a bad way to spent the festive season.  In the later afternoon I went to hang around with Ms. Tanzanian Pageant at her restaurant/bar where I helped her to blow up balloons and hang Christmas decorations.  It is a white Christmas for me with perfect powder sand that makes everyone who sees it happy.  The moon that showed up at dusk was probably the prettiest I have ever seen it look.

I spent most of the evening on the phone with family and friends at home.  It is always so nice to hear everyone’s voices on the holiday season.  There are moments that I wish I could be transported home a couple of hours at a time to see faces and then back here again.  I come from a place of very special people.

My Christmas Roost.

A local friend named Christian showed up to hang around with us at Ms. Tanzanian Pageant’s bar.  He told me that when his family has Christmas at home, they kill a cow, and no one can go home until they have eaten the entire cow, “Maybe two weeks.  Maybe whole month until go home.  Whole cow first!”

In the evening, Ms. Tanzanian Pageant and I went to the local bar to hang out, eat, and have a beer.  It was quiet when we arrived and I was surprised that even though this island is 99% Muslim, that the bar was not busy on Christmas Eve.  It would not last and within an hour it got crazy and busy there.  And it got loud.  And it got drunk.  People were freaking smashed in there.  I generally like the attention that I get as a foreigner in a land peculiar to the life I grew up in, but being around completely drunk locals who want to talk is less of the attention that I like.  There are times when I have to make an escape plan to get away from them.

A beautiful Christmas moon.

Overall it was a pretty exotic Christmas Eve.  My friend Markus wrote to me and told me, “I hope that you get to play Santa Claus tonight and empty your Santa’s Sack good and proper.”  I think that will be the quote of the holidays…

Emptying Santa’s Sack is pretty freaking funny!