Titbits

On my way back to the Netherlands. Sitting here in the airport lounge of Nairobi waiting some 6 hours for my KLM flight to Amsterdam. I just arrived here from Kigali on Kenya Airways. So far so good. Let's hope my suitcase will make it too, so my overall score of actually arriving with my suitcase at the final destination remains over 50%.

This will probably be the last post from Africa for a while as my assignment is over and there's no new exotic assignment on the horizon. This last one - as tradition demands - will be a collection of small little titbits of info and experiences.

Grenade

This just in! Last night somebody, probably a Hutu hard-liner, threw a grenade into the Kigali Memorial (the genocide museum), killing one police officer. It is still genocide memorial week and, like I stated in my previous post, the genocide ideology is still very much alive in some parts. Scary people.

Off the Chart!

Restaurants here are funny. Whenever you go out with 3 or more persons (that number seems to be the tipping point) there is a 99+ % chance that at least one of the meals you ordered is not available. At every restaurant! The best part is that they don't always say that right away. Sometimes you actually eat your entrées first (for the Americans out there: entrées is French for starters, not main courses), wait for another 15 or so minutes and then the waiter comes out to tell you your main course is not available.

White Ride

Taxi's are cute too. They have local and tourist prices. Well, it's actually the Muzungu price. Muzungu is local for white person, like Mulungu in Moçambique, Makamba in Curaçao or Bakra in Surinam. Once I went out with a Rwandan friend and as we left the place, he stopped a cab an negotiated a good price. As we were about to get in, the cab driver noticed me and immediately doubled the price. Of course, my friend didn't agree. The cab driver started pleading with him along the lines of "But he's Muzungu! You have to give me this opportunity to make him pay. It's the system!". He was more or less annoyed at my friend for denying him this opportunity to make me overpay.

However, people, including taxi drivers, are very trusting. On more that one occasion I got in a taxi, only to find out later that either I didn't have enough cash on me or that the diver didn't have change. "No problem! You pay me next time" and that was it. He would find me one way or another and than I would pay. Can you imagine that in 'our' world?

Street Selling

Kigali is nowhere near Maputo when it comes to selling stuff on the street. As you probably remember from previous posts, the Maputo streets combined make up one large open air mobile shopping mall. Guys run around selling everything. Kigali not. Apart from a whole bunch of boys selling prepaid cards for your mobile phone, you hardly find street sellers. It is mainly limited to some guys selling magazines and newspapers and some other selling maps. Yes, maps. Maps of the city, the country or the continent. And not street maps, but the kind you hang on your office wall. I had no idea you could make a living of maps.

What you can also do on the street is make a phone call. No, not with your cell phone and not in a public phone. Well.... some sort of public phone. You have guys walking the street carrying what looks like a desk phone. Just like the one in your office. The difference is that there is as small antenna attached to it. These guys are some sort of mobile public pay phone. You stop them, make your call and then pay for it. It's a funny sight seeing someone making a phone call holding the horn while some guys is standing next to him holding a telephone base station in his hands.

Street Labour

As I mentioned before the streets are very clean and that is partially due to a local tradition. On every last Saturday of the month, between 9 and 11 am, people stop doing their usual routine, but all go on the street to clean it. I'm not kidding! The government has introduced this form of community service and all participate. Cars on the road stop, people get out and clean the street! Can you imagine this? In Holland you only have to clean the streets for some 80 hours after having committed at least 3 murders in the first degree!

By the way, if you ever intend to travel to Rwanda, do not bring plastic bags. They will not allow plastic bags to enter the country and you will have to leave it at the airport customs. All stores also pack your groceries in brown paper bags.

Night Life... or dead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what some of you really want to know is, what the night life in Kigali is like. The short version is that night life in Kigali is slow... barely existent. You have 2 dance clubs, one dance lounge and a small handful of bar restaurants. One particular bar restaurant is quite okay. It's called Republika and you can eat outside on a terrace overlooking the city. Inside is the bar where people have drinks on a weekend night before they go out. They play way-too-loud R&B music on way-too-small speakers. The music is totally distorted, but so are the ears of the staff, since none of them seems to notice it. And it is like that every night.

Then there's the B Club (or Big Club, as no one seems to agree on the name). That's a very pretty lounge place. Trendy interior and trendy prices! Normally you pay some EUR 1.20 for a beer in Kigali night-life, but in B-Club a double vodka red-bull will set you back some 14 Euros.

Then there are the two clubs. Cadillac is a place mostly visited by locals, with the occasional muzungu. They play mostly R&B, hip-hop and local dance beats. When you walk in this place, you think you've just time-travelled back to the late seventies. It's dark! Very dark and the lighting exists of tons and tons of blacklight (the purple UV light that makes your fake peroxide blonde hair light up like Baghdad) and a whole bunch of light tubes. Remember those? The transparent garden hoses with running lights in it. These days you only see these being used as Xmas lighting at home, but in Cadillac it still has the coolness factor.

The most famous dance club is Planet Club, but all locals refer to it as KBC. It is located in the Kigali Business Centre, and business is definitely something that goes on in there. The place itself is quite dark and divided into several sections. There's the dance floor, a bar area, a section with pool tables and a large lounge area with comfortable couches, beds and two large film projection screens.

Even though it is a normal club, frequented by locals and foreigners, it is also very much a working girl place and therefore quite dodgy if you're a white male and not interested. You will be hunted down and after she has shown her 3 best dance moves in front of you, she will tell you the code words: "Will you buy me a beer?". Saying 'No!' means "I'm not interested" and she'll walk away looking for the next victim.

Of course, naive me didn't understand that at first. The first night I was there, I was standing at the bar ordering a beer for me and a colleague. A girl came up and popped the question. In Mozambique it was not unusual that a girl would ask the same question, but there it meant exactly that. You're a white guy in a position to buy a local person a drink. No strings attached. So in Planet I decided to be nice and actually gave the girl a beer. She just looked at it with surprise and then gave it back telling me she didn't actually want a beer. That's when I realised my mistake. Oh well, more beer for me!

There's one thing I see in Kigali night clubs which I haven't seen anywhere before. The large number of guys that are sleeping in a club. Once it gets late, you will notice guys all around you sleeping. In their chair, on a couch, with their head on a table, in a barstool leaning on the bar, everywhere! It's bizarre! Go home!

Musicology

I will leave you, Rwanda and this blog with the most spectacular item I have found in Africa. Forget about the elephants, shrimps, the cars and even the gorilla's. The best item to be found here is the following Hifi Stereo Set (for those of you that think Wham! is a laundry detergent: HiFi stands for High Fidelity and that was as spectacular back then as Dolby DTS THX Digital 7.1 Surround is today). This is the mother of all sound systems! I think we should all save up and buy it for James' new apartment. It will come in handy during his house-warming party. I found in a local supermarket, which - by the way - also sells tennis rackets, garden chairs and pool tables. And it's only 800 Euros!

Do notice the opening at the top. That space is especially carved in there for your CD player, which is not included. What?? You thought that 800 Euros would by you ALL those lights AND a CD player?? Get real!!