Exploring Nairobi

Left to my own devices today and with a Rough Guide in hand I set about trying to begin to understand the logic of Nairobi. I started my day at YaYa ("A mall that will make you feel like you're back in Jersey," according to an unnamed resident of Nairobi native to the Garden State) with a second breakfast and my guidebook to get my bearings and chart a course for the day. I was shocked at how much like Jersey it actually was ... but without the Jersey hair. There were, however, lots of white people.

The rest of my day was spent immersing myself slowly into Nairobi proper. The biggest adventures of the day included transportation. As someone who is always a little nervous before she knows where she's going, I was really grateful for Catherine's advice to start myself out on a bus rather than a matatu. The bus was easy and pleasant -- complete with receipts, a seat, and a lovely local woman for a seatmate who advised me on what nightclubs I must not miss. On the way home, however, after watching bus after bus pass me by without stopping or being beaten by a local for the last seat on one of the few buses that did stop, I decided that my one afternoon of walking Nairobi's streets I had prepared me for a matatu.

Matatus are basically shared taxis that run along the same routes as buses, but when they are crammed full of people they can be hard to enter/exit and in general the vans are in various states of repair (or disrepair). The whole process feels quite a bit more chaotic than the bus, but somehow I ended up on a matatu full of teenagers and children, and I think I may have underpaid ... but given the louder-than-imaginable music and our inability to understand each other, the fare collector gave up on me and let it go. I may, however, have paid for my discount fare with some mild hearing loss.

Nairobi isn't a strikingly beautiful place, but has a very strong pulse and vibrance. To avoid appearing too much like the green visitor that I am I did not even try to capture the chaos and energy photographically. But to break up all this text, here's a bit of what I saw while wandering around Uhuru Park, located on the edge of the main commercial district.