Mercury's

And after the last somber post, and as a reflection of the fullness of life, I should write about something more joyous.  During our recent trip to Zanzibar we finally made it out to Mercury's Bar.  As a goodly number of people know, Freddy Mercury of Queen fame was born in Zanzibar.  His family were Zoroastrians, and Zanzibar used to be a center for the faith (although sadly all you have now are ruins of Zoroastrian fire temples).  There is a cottage industry there in showing gullible around to the boyhood home of Mercury, which tends to have the validity of most cryptozoological studies.  We ended up there because we were trying to figure out exactly how long it took to walk from the Flamingo Guesthouse to the port to catch our ferry back to Dar Es Salaam, and it's along the way.  It's odd I went there since I won a very famous dart contest (also chronicled on this blog) with Sanford Zale wherein no one is ever allowed to sing or even mention the Queen song Bohemian Rhapsody. Nevertheless, we visited it, despite my objection to shameless tourist spots,  Nevertheless, it was a nice spot and had good food, so, despite my better judgment, I'm sure I'll be back on some future trip to Zanzibar.

I sent this picture to Sanford Zale with a question about why he wasn't there with us.  His response was what you might expect: "because I'm a poor boy from a poor family, nobody loves me."  He was immediately disqualified.

The interior of Mercury's.  It was before noon on a run of the mill monsoon day, so it was empty.  I'm sure that's not the case at night.

This may look like we're partaking in exotic drinks, but instead we're sensibly replacing electrolytes by drinking coconut juice straight from the young coconut.  It's an oddly sensible thing to do.

Doubtless Sanford would have ordered the Bohemian Rhapsody.

If nothing else it was a great place to wait out another monsoon downpour.