Jimmy,
I've been living in Dar for 9 months now and overall it's a nice place to be. If you have the chance to come and live here for a while, I'd definitely go for it.
On the downside, the traffic is appalling and during rainy season at the rush hour my journey home was taking more than 4 hours. Yes there is malaria here, but no worse than most of the places I lived in West Africa. I was also unlucky enough to catch Dengue fever earlier this year, which was particularly unpleasant. However, there are a number of very good hospitals in the city. They are quite expensive, so make sure you have good health insurance (I don't
).
If you're renting accommodation yourself, you'll find it very expensive in most of the nice places to live and there's nowhere really nice close to the airport. Electricity supply is not as erratic as many of the places I've lived in Africa, and most houses rented to expats come with a generator, 24 hour security and good water storage.
There are quite a few good supermarkets where you can buy most of the things you'd expect in a European or American supermarket - but rather more expensive.
Buying cars here is very expensive as there's no local manufacturing capacity and most vehicles are subject to 100% import duty. Car spares are also very expensive for the same reason.
Night life is good with some excellent restaurants and bars and good live music venues at weekends. The variety of food is good, from local to Ethiopian, French, Italian, Indian, Japanese and Thai. The local beers are good and there's plenty of (mostly South African) wine available.
The people are very friendly and the fusion of Africa, Asia and Arabia is much different from West Africa. The countryside is beautiful with many game parks to visit and if you just have a day or 2 off, Zanzibar is a great place for a short visit. There are lots of beautiful beaches and good diving is available from many of the little islands down the coast. If you want to know more, feel free to PM me.