I had a fantastic time in Kenya and I experienced a lot in my 4 days there. I've decided in order to make my blog posts more readable and shorten the amount of time it takes me to write them, I am going to write about Kenya over three blog posts, and then I'm going to write a post complaining about the Canadian government. You've been warned.
It all started two years ago in a little town called Pretoria South Africa. I was a fresh faced graduate student and Gitonga was an intern when we met at the Institute for Security Studies and we developed a friendship that we would try to continue over facebook. Never would I have imagined that I would be in East Africa at the time of his wedding, no less be invited. But there I was on December 7th heading to Nairobi.
On the way to Nairobi I took the overnight bus from Kampala. Queen's Coach is a luxury bus line which means they have hairconditioning and seats that recline (no washrooms though). They also feed you snacks of highly fatty cookies, orange pop and coffee which seems questionable in the middle of the night. I was relieved when I had no problems at the border.
I arrived in Nairobi at 9 in the morning and headed straight for the Hibiscus guest house where I had booke a room. It was close by to a place Gitonga had reccommended although $15 less per night and actually had better reviews. I have to say it really did live up to its reputation. The staff were very friendly, the rooms were clean, it had beautiful gardens and mattresses on the bed that actually had springs (this is not common in East Africa). 
After settling in I decided that it was time for an adventure and so I called the cab driver who dropped me off and asked him to take me to the Kenyan National Museum. The National Museum is on hilly grounds surrounded by trees and statues. It contains a detailed history of Kenya, a hall of mamals and art exhibits. I think the highlight of the of the museum were the skulls of early hominids on display behind some glass doors which I had seen pictures of in my 2nd African History Course at Carleton. After walking through the museum for about 2 hours I sat down and had a coffee and a chicken pie. Black coffee is a bit less expensive in Kenya than in Uganda and of a somewhat higher quality. I was happy.
After walking through the gardens around the museum and checking out Nature Kenya I decided to walk to downtown Nairobi. When I asked the security guard at the gate directions he responded "No, no it's too far it will take you too long" and I asked how far it was and he said "It would take YOU 2 hours." So I asked him how long it would take him and he said "1 hour" in the end it took me 30 minutes including a stop at the Masai Market. When I visited the Masai market I didn't fully have my bearings as I was quite over tired and also trying to ajust to the prices (one Kenyan shilling is 28 Uganda shillings which is 1.1 dollars) and so I was ripped of on the first item I bought and then bought a similar item from a different stall for a sixth of the cost. Oh well you win some you lose some.
On the way to the center of town I met a young woman coming from the University of Nairobi who helped me cross the street. There are more traffic lights in Nairobi but its harder to get across the road because there are more lanes of traffic. After explaining that she was a highschool English Literature teacher she told me she was doing a Masters in International Studies. When I asked why she said she wanted to be an ambassador, but not one working for the government. She told me she was a poet and that she wanted to travel around the world and tell people about life in Kenya and talk about its richness in contrast with its poverty (no pun intended) and everything in between. This was the first of quite a few inspiring conversations I had in Kenya, and to be honest I needed the inspiration. She then delivered me to my bus, which of course got stuck in a traffic jam, some things are the same everywhere in Africa.
When I got back to the hotel I read and used the internet in the guest house's sitting room. While I was there a middle aged Dutch man named Marcel came in. We spoke about what each of us was doing in Nairobi and as it turned out Marcel was helping to run a development project in the Kibera slum which was helping to fund five schools and was employing 12 women on a regular basis (and 60 on a casual basis) to make jewellery which they were selling in the Netherlands (at major chains such as Hema where I bought a set of bright orange plastic dishes 5 years ago which are with me in Kampala) and other department stores. They were working on an order for a shipment of 75,000 bracelets and under a lot of time pressure because the beads had not yet arrived and the order was due two days later. After asking some pointed questions about the nature of his work I decided to go out on a limb and asked if I could visit the project the next day, and to my surprise he said yes! We agreed to meet the next morning.
Later that evening I had the opportunity to meet with 3 more CIDA interns for dinner. They were all lawyers, two were working in Nairobi (Josh was working with Gitonga which is how we met) and one was working in Tanzania. We had dinner at a place called artscafe which was somewhat surreal. It was located in a large, western style mall. It boasted three kinds of sugar (okay one of them was sweet and low) and a very modern interior, and jazz music played over the speakers, quite a change from Kampala. During the conversation the visitor from Tanzania indicated that she wanted to go to an elephant orphanage where we could see baby elephants eat their lunch. I asked her if I could come too and she said yes. She then went on to talk about the other adventures she was interested in having in Nairobi and talked about wanting to visit the Kibera slum, and so I told her about my plans the next day and invited her to come along too.
My first impression of Kenya was that it is much more developed than Uganda. There are more paved roads with fewer potholes. There were apparent, strong anti-corruption laws which were highlighted throughout the city. There were much larger buildings and the city was bigger as a whole. No one warned me when I packed for Kenya that it was going to be cold and although the weather was sunny and the perfect temperature during the day time I found myself quite chilled at night. The other thing that I found quite remarkable was that there was a lot less dust in Nairobi, in fact unlike in Uganda I was actually able to get my feet fully clean when I washed them.
That's the end of the first chapter. Stay tuned tomorrow for the next!
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