Rest in Kigali

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Kigali Day 2 has been good. We (I) slept in this morning and had no rush to get out of the house. Our first order of business was to get our bus tickets for tomorrow’s trip back to Kampala. The taxi ride across town took a good hour. After that, we went back across town to the restaurant where Honoline works. It’s a really nice place. It is run by some Americans and has some familiar foods on the menu. Even better than that, it has wireless internet that is more or less high-speed! That is how I have been able to post so much and even include pictures. We just stopped by to drop off our computers to be used at a later time since we didn’t want to haul them across town.

Honoline’s restaurant is called Heaven and is just down the hill from the Hotel Des Mille Collines, which is the one made famous by Paul Rusesabagina and the movie Hotel Rwanda. After dropping our things here, we walked around town and did a bit more shopping.

Nothing too exciting as we were walking around. Sarah got a nice dress/outfit for her aunt, which I am modeling tonight. I purchased a phone for any future trips to East Africa. The rest of the afternoon was spent hanging out in the restaurant using the internet. We made some calls and thing and I was able to post photos. This restaurant has wireless and I think it’s even fairly high-speed. So nice! And there were no electricity problems to worry about!

We’re going to have dinner soon. The menu has some great stuff on it, so I’m excited.

A few funny things about Rwanda:

The people put mayonnaise on EVERYTHING! Salad, spaghetti, anything. There’s practically a whole aisle for it at the supermarket.

The moto drivers (motos are the Rwandan equivalent of boda bodas) are required by law to wear helmets. The passengers are as well. Most of the helmets are green, and when the motos come in groups, they look like fleets of bugs or something because most of the helmets are green.

I think there are a few good reasons Kigali is cleaner: They have sidewalks, so there are fewer people on the streets. The garbage collection is better, so there is a lot less trash on the ground. Today we even saw people who work for the city or something who were out sweeping the sidewalks. Also, there is more intentional drainage all over the city. Instead of the water running down the dirt roads and eroding them, there are ditches dug along the side of almost all the streets, which I’m sure is great help in the rainy season.

After dinner, the internet was unfortunately being sort of wonky, so I didn’t get to post this. We then hopped on a bus to go home and took motos (boda bodas) from the taxi park to the house. In some ways, they’re nicer than the Ugandan ones, except for the helmets. The foot pegs are easier to find and there are more legit handles, but I definitely burned my leg on the exhaust pipe. Oh well. I was nervous about falling off the seat as we went up the steep hill, but we made it to the house in one piece.

All in all, it was a great day of rest. Tomorrow, we travel back to Kampala at 6 A.M. Yikes! The wedding is on Saturday, and we go to Kenya on Monday. I only tell you this because I don’t know when the next time I’ll have email will be.

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