Blogs from Kigali, Ville de Kigali, Rwanda, Africa - page 3

The title of this entry is probably the most useful thing I can say in French here. It means "I speak a little French." It saves me from the embarassment of stammering in English that I don't know any French, but saves me from saying one sentence and having people think I am fluent. Not really related, but I thought it was funny. Today I participated in Umuganda. Umuganda happens on the last Saturday of every month. The communtiy gets together with their local neighbors to work on different improvement projects. Often times it is filling in potholes on the dirt roads or picking up litter along the roads in the communtiy. On my project day we doubled the width of a bridge which crosses over a stream in a small ravine. The bridge was made ... read more

Today was rough. For some reason it was far from the toughest day of the trip though. We visited three different genocide memorials in the area of Kigali. The first two were churches which were sites of massacres. We walked through the gates of the first, Ntarama. Against the back wall of the church were shelves which had more than a hundred skulls on each. The top shelf had arm bones. The bottom shelf consisted of femurs and pelvises. This was not quite what I expected, but I definitely felt the impact. The walls of the church were are covered with the clothes of those who were massacred. In the front of the church were the foam mattresses people brought with them. Next to this were shelves with their belongings. One shelf held food containers they ... read more

Hi All Thanks for all the lovely emails about the photos we posted yesterday! :-) I have now finished uploading the rest of our photos, and Keira is busy adding extra information to them as we speak. We have added the following sets to our 'Big Adventure Collection' : The Crater Lakes and Bigodi Wetlands Rwenzori Mountains Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, including Mountain Gorilla Tracking Lake Bunyonyi, including Canoe Trekking We hope you enjoy these ones too... the blog, to acc... read more

It's my last day in Kigali for a while and i've just been wandering around admiring every other women's wig and enjoying feeling at home .... and astounded at the number of Mzungu who live here!! The population of Kigali is over a million despite having predicted 420,000 for 2020 (though not sure when that prediction was made) and there must be a fair few thousand mzungu. And the country had over 8.5million in 2002. Apparently the current child birth rate is 6 kids per family and the government are trying to bring it down to 3. I headed to Butare the second biggest town in Rwanda yesterday, though Kigali is by far the biggest and the others are all similarly sized, and pretty small at that. They host the National Museum, largest cathedral and National ... read more

Some general restaurant info: Customer service in restaurants is the main area for improvement. Eating out takes between 1 and 2 hours (or more), and many menu options are not actually available. There is a great variety of quality for the food and the wait staff. Most of the eateries make great use of outdoor space with the majority of the tables set out on patios. Papyrus (5 stars): Our favorite restaurant and a short walk from home, Papyrus serves wood-fired pizzas and homemade pasta. Their menu is in French and English, and they have a good selection of wines, including some inexpensive South African choices. The pasta ranks above L.A. restaurants. Shokola (5 stars): This Middle Eastern restaurant features fresh fruit juices, good tea selection, Mexican food on Sundays, hookah, and couch seating. Flamingo (4 ... read more