Nairobi, cont.

Day 6, Monday, May 28th, Nairobi. From Brian:

More exploring today. We felt pretty comfortable using the Matatus today, and even got off more or less where we wanted to this time. If you ignore the general condition of roads and traffic in the city, these are actually a pretty good transportation system. Because they will rarely go on their route without a full passenger load (14 people or so), they can charge only 30 shillings (USD 0.40) per passenger. Because it's a private system and not very heavily regulated, it makes for a very efficient system (as long as the matatus don't overload with 20 passengers or so and cause a safety hazard) (which they do).

We went down to check out the National Museum of Kenya, which contains some really cool taxidermies of african animals as well as some hominid fossils that were found in Kenya. We couldn't decide if the fossils were real or not - they did look real, but there was no guard at the museum, just plastic cases. And the "preservation" system was to lay the fossils on some foam. Let's just say I hope those aren't the real ones.

We saw a park yesterday that we wanted to check out today. It's kind of their Central Park, I suppose, located just by the city center, but it feels very calm and removed from the craziness of the city.

A few notes on Nairobi and my experience here so far:

This is a different city than any other I have been in. Definitely not planned in advance and not designed to handle the traffic it now has, you can tell that the Brits were here. Roads are windy and there are roundabouts everywhere. There are some nicer sections of town, but because there is no money for infrastructure, there are hardly any sections of town that don't look at least a little run down. The monsoons don't help either. It becomes very hard to maintain roads and sidewalks when they have to withstand a rainy season each year.

I've also never been this acutely aware that I am white. In South America, I was definitely a foreigner, but you had to wait until I opened my mouth to find that out. I've been in cities in Haiti and Jamaica where you could tell I was in the minority by my skin color, but I was with a group in both of those settings and with people who knew what they were doing in those cultures. Here, Sharon and I have been by ourselves for a few days now that Eric is back in camp, and it's been an experience to just walk around the city. It's good and bad, and most of it comes down to money. White usually means rich, and it seems like I'm walking around town with a Dollar Sign spinning around my head. We walk by matatu stands and are almost physically pushed into them by the operators. Kids on the street see us from a mile away and head straight for us to ask for money. Businesses will sometimes push us to the head of a line. But there are upsides: People seem to have a great respect for Sharon, as a white woman, and afford her special consideration in some cases. We are also pretty much able to go wherever we want, because there is no reason to shoo a rich person away from most places.