Muraho

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Muraho from Kigali

So you might have guessed that Muraho is hello in Kinyarwanda. I landed in Kigali last night after a pleasant 10 hour flight from London via Brussels despite being stuck in a middle seat. I read "Water for Elephants," which was recommend to me while I was in Dublin, it was great, I also recommend it. There was also some horrible movie with Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon about this guy who is a die hard Red Sox fan, anyone else seen it? It was just really really bad.

Anyway, I landed around 7 and it was still warm out which was great after the weather London has been having the past few weeks. The border guard was probably the nicest I have ever encountered, welcomed me to Rwanda etc etc.

J and I went for dinner down the road from where he lives, and managed to order in a combination of poor English, French and Kinyarwanda. That seems to be normal fare around the city, though there are a lot of people who have very good English. If only I had actually learned some French in Montreal...

Today we walked down to a market to buy some prizes for a "Price is Right" night that J is hosting tonight at a bar that his friend just opened. The market was pretty much like all the other markets I've been to while I was in the Middle East, a whole bunch of shit that they try to sell to you for about 5x what you should be paying. And then we entered the t-shirt section and it was exactly like walking into a Salvation Army... except in Africa and in make-shift stalls. But the shirts were all the same, I would not have been suprised to see a Camp Hatikvah shirt there. We bought a pretty sweet pink unicorn shirt, which ironically, had a Salvation Army price tag stapled to it.

Then we took motorcycles to the centre of town, went for lunch and walked around a bit. I had the pleasure of explaining to the guy who I was bargaining with to exchange money about the financial crisis and why the pound's value had dropped so much in the past two weeks. We went to a grocery store that opened last month, it was pretty crazy, they had almost all of the same products as we do in Canada.

Pretty much Rwanda is awesome. Kigali is one of the cleanest cities I've ever been in. I think I've seen maybe 2 pieces of garbage on the street since I've been here. The landscape surrounding the city is beautiful, and it is nice not to feel like I am going to be run over if I don't keep a near running pace while walking down the street. It is just crazy to think that less than 15 years ago genocide was occuring throughout the city and that most people I see walking down the street lived through it. Kigali is very well secured and has quite a few armed soldiers walking around, but unlike Israel where there was always this feeling of fear and danger in the air, I don't feel anything like that here. The country runs quite well and is growing at a fast rate, probably in great credit to the fact that the president is essentially a dictator, but as we were talking about last night, democracy really doesn't work the best everywhere.

That is about it, some of you will be very amused to know that while we were walking around in a mid-day rain storm I bailed so hard in front of about 15 people, pretty sure I made their day.

Until next time...

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Comments

[Mia Edbrooke]

Amazing. I fully support this initiative. And just when I thought I couldn't be more excited!