July 10 - Kenya: Nairobi
We happily slept in until 8:00 this morning. We both have upset stomachs, and figure it's from the burgers from lunch yesterday. But this is to be expected and that's why God made Immodium, right?
Today was full of errands. We ran around the city for hours doing administrative stuff. Here's the boring list:
We had to go to about 10 bookstores before we finally found an Egypt Lonely Plant book. We would like to have one for Nairobi, but it's not worth the $20 for 3 more days. So we - the budget travelers - covertly read some Nairobi restaurant recommendations out of one of the Lonely Planets in a bookstore we were in. Jon quietly read them to me and I scribbled them on the back of a map we got at the Hilton the other night. We had to be very sneaky about it and it was quite funny!
A late lunch was at one of these recommendations: La Scala - a yummy Italian restaurant where we ate for $5 each. Then we went to the Internet Cafe and uploaded our belated web pages. That was a two-hour ordeal, but we were happy to have finally been able to do it. By 5:00, we went back to the hotel to rest until dinner.
Dinner - Mayur Restaurant
At 6:00, we walked across town to the Muyur Restaurant - a vegetarian Indian place. This was Nairobi during rush hour and it was absolute chaos! New York City has nothing on these streets. I hadn't realized until now that NONE of the strategically-placed stoplights actually WORK. There were cars, bikes, and people absolutely everywhere!
We finally found the restaurant in a sketchy but busy part of town, just off a traffic circle. We snagged a seat at the window so we could watch the antics below us. This traffic circle seems to be an informal bus depot. I say "informal" because they just stop in the middle of the road to pick up fares.
This is where it's important to describe these buses. The are not generic city buses. Each bus is painted and jacked up to reflect the personality of the driver and conductor. If a low-rider were to be reincarnated in a 2nd life, this is what it would want to be. These buses have graphics, labels, florescent lights, strobe lights, glow-in-the-dark paint jobs, and most have blacklights inside the bus. They come in all sorts of colors: purple, green, orange, pink, yellow. Each driver has clearly put a lot of time and effort into making his ride "the coolest". But the attitude doesn't end just with the paint job. Each bus is actually NAMED! Just a few examples we noted: Phat, Dr. U-Neek, Straight Butta, Henchmen, Wutz?Next, Disaster, The Myth, East Sidaz, Ol' Skool, Hunan Jr., Mr T. And they drive with the same attitude that is shown on the paint job. They drive up on curbs, over barricades, anywhere to get out of a traffic jam first. It was quite a site!
Seriously, we sat and watched this traffic circle for a good 30 minutes without boredom. But then our Indian Buffet was ready so we grabbed our plates and went to the table. The food was delicious and very, very spicy! There was one other table of Americans in the joint with us, and they seemed to enjoy it too.
The Mummy Returns
After dinner, we caught a cab back to the hotel (no walking in Nairobi in the dark!) and then went to go see "The Mummy Returns" at the cinema around the corner. The theater has a special on Tuesdays - any film is 160 shillings (about $2.25) so we elected to see the Mummy over some silly Denise Richards movie called "Valentine" or something. So the movie tickets said it would start at 8:30, but it turns out we were wrong. First the Kenyan National Anthem played on the screen and we had to stand for it. Then there was some bizarre commercial/propaganda film about President Moi, some annual festival, and a bunch of hotels. This commercial lasted about 15 minutes and finally the movie began.
It's a pretty bad movie. I'm not sure why anyone casts Brendan Frasier in any film, but at least the special effects were good. I wonder, actually, why they felt obliged to put dialogue in there at all. I think it would have been better without the cheesy one-liners. But I'm sure it will make the production studio a pretty penny.
The movie let out at 11:00, so we speed-walked back to the hotel past the working girls and into our room where we crashed.