Last weekend our friend Malozi invited us to come to Mwenge to learn painting in real African style. She owns a small shop with some friends in this market and sells just terrific pictures.
Paintings at Mwenge
In general, they do a lot of different art craft at Mwenge market. You can buy hand-made jewelry (got earrings out of banana leaves and coconut), amazing carvings, clothes, shoes, blankets, paintings,…. a lot! And you can also watch the people making these things.
In our painting lesson, we learned how to set up the frame and paint with oil colors. Instead of a brush, we used a knife for painting! That was really interesting. I think we quite made a good job, Kiki, Jonas, Godfrey and me.
Painting Massai
Another thing, we also tried to learn there, is how to negotiate properly. From my experience now, you can easily start with a third of the start price and then meet somewhere in the lower middle. That should work. So I bough some shoes for 14000 TSH (ca. 7,5 €) instead of 30000 TSH.
carving
For the way to Mwenge we took a Dalla Dalla, this old Toyota buses. They are sooo cheap (400 TSH) and always exciting. Its full of people and sometimes there is even a person outside hanging. Beside the Dalla Dalla, you can also go by Bajaji (3 wheel vehicles for up to 6 persons), Taxi (never for us) or motorcycle (which “can” transport up to 3 persons 😉 ).