Dear blogger

Kigali is not what you think.

Roads are great, weather is brilliant.

The fun is in the small things. On the street there are boys wandering around with yellow shirts on and they carry what looks like a normal office phone. It turns out that you can make calls with them and just pay for the call, a very different interpretation of ‘mobile phone’.

Of course Africa needs a bit of a different mind set. Going out for a quick coffee is impossible. The quickest is probably half an hour. Checking out from the hotel took us nearly an hour. And when I asked why I had to pay for the room, when the embassy booked the room, they did not have a clue what I meant, even though we got the special rate that the embassy has. So they asked me where we lived, as we couldn’t answer that question, we just paid the bill and I will claim it at the embassy. Luckily the hotel does accept credit cards, even though that adds another 10-20 minutes to the whole procedure.

This weekend we had a car from the embassy. Friday night (night used loosely as it started at 17.00 and ended 21.00) we had a birthday party of two colleagues. From there we took over an embassy car from the temporary colleague who doesn’t need it in the weekend. He parked the car on a hill, so I had to reverse this huge Toyota pick up in the dark. When we finally moved forward it made a lot of noise and hardly went forward. So close to the residence of the American ambassador we stopped and found out it was in ‘low gear’. We could have chosen a better place to stop, but as mzungu (whitey) in a CD car, you can get away with almost anything. For example when you change money in the bank you get automatically pushed in front of the queue, whether you want or not. Differences between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ are big, and it takes a lot of getting used to having servants everywhere. The houses of ‘people like us’ all have guards, standard procedure is that you drive up to the gate and horn, the guard will then open the gate. As far as I’m aware houses don’t have house numbers, and street names are often not displayed, you just have to know where people live. Today (Sunday) we went to a childrens-party, every occasion is turned into a party here. The instructions where: A vague map with instructions “the third (green) gate on the left after the ‘Papyrus’”.

The public transport is much like elsewhere in Africa; minibuses with their routes painted on the front and back. In addition to that there are here also motorbikes with green helmets, one for the driver and one for the passenger. Needless to say these are a bit less safe than the car taxis. Saturday we went shopping for supplies for our apartment. To our own surprise we found the shopping centre someone recommended to us. It was clearly not for the lower class, therefore also a high rate of whites present. The coffee place had very good coffee and free internet if you bring your laptop, so half the tables where occupied with laptops. Internet is per definition slow here, but you get used to it.

Lon