Kenya, Part One
Finally back from the legendary Dark Continent, and boy are my arms... nah, let's move on.
First off, just to officially get it out of the way, come to Kenya; we got lions. That's right, I had to post this. That's the way these things go.
Or, if you don't want to read, maybe you need to take an energy drink. It'll make you appreciate Kenya more.
20 Sep 09 - Today we departed for Kenya. Our team consists of myself and two persons whom I’ll codename Cyber and Titan, as well as someone who would join us from Africa, codename Boss.
Cyber, Titan, and I meet up at JFK in the Swissair business lounge around 3:30 pm. The fact that we're here at all is amazing, since the people arranging our flights only authorized and issued our tickets eight hours before our actual travel time. Mmmm, tastes like disorganization. But that’s really par for the course for the preparation of this conference. Cheeky organizers. Considering they knew our names and official travel times two weeks in advance, that seemed unnecessary. But as always I digress.
The positive side: all official travel greater than nine hours total flying time is automatically done in business class. Woohoo, booze!
The negative side: Swissair’s business class does not stand up to many other business classes. Somehow we expected more from Switzerland. Although their lounge and meals all came with great cheese and chocolate. Good old predictable Switzerland. Spent the flight watching “The Matrix”, edited for TV (“Gosh darnit, Neo, you can’t do this!”), and then landing in Zurich International Airport. Cyber, who managed to get food poisoning the night before, survives the flight intact, if perhaps a little pale and green.
21 Sep 09 - We land in Zurich bright and early. The pilot announces that, due to fog conditions, the plane will be piloted by the computer. That's odd, I think; what kind of crazy-ass fog are they talking about? So I look out the window and see some cloud cover below us. We hit the clouds. Nothing special, really; just dense white clouds that you can't see through. I'm watching and waiting and all of a sudden WHUMP! The runway appears out of NOWHERE and we touch down. We're talking zero visibility here. My faith in computers steps up a notch; it was like flying into Steven King's "The Mist".
Zurich International Airport has to be the most boring and functional airport ever designed. See previous paragraph, “Good old predictable Switzerland”. The gate area looked like a giant warehouse with seats and garage doors. We are nearly the only people in an enormous waiting area. And, of course, the enormous windows showed us nothing but the densest layer of fog you've ever not seen through. However, a lot can be forgiven when Toblerone is for sale by the metric tonne. OM NOM NOM. We catch our transfer to Nairobi, and Cyber and I get mysteriously upgraded to First Class while Titan gets left behind in business class. She looks forlorn. We manage not to mock her, choosing instead to focus on the champagne and the incredibly malodorous person sitting to Cyber’s right. Cue Cloudkill, 10’ radius, save vs. poison or suffer horribly for eight hours in a small cabin of circulated air. It took a lot of champagne to ignore that.
We land in Nairobi at 7:00 pm local time (NYC+8 hours) and are greeted almost immediately by representatives from the local ministry. Thanks to their influence we encounter the fastest “get out of plane and airport” transition I’ve ever seen- in 20 minutes we were loaded up in a convoy and heading into town. Thus began our experience with local drivers.
Kenyans love to drive. They love mass transit. Their buses are big vans outfitted with lots of seats. They drive British style. And the rules of the road are very casual guidelines. For instance, passing. People pass without regard to: hills, opposing traffic, road size, lane size, car size, speed, pedestrians, sidewalks, bicyclists, and pretty much anything else that might come close to the road. We’ve seen some pretty good accidents where maybe passing didn’t work so well. We’ve seen four cars wide on two lanes of traffic. We’ve seen passes uphill and around a curve with maybe a dozen feet of space to spare. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. I’ve seen maybe four traffic lights anywhere; everything else is just self-monitored intersections and traffic circles, the bane of driverkind. Merging into traffic is like stabbing someone with a knife - just stick your car in hard and fast and hope for the best. One of our drivers even mentioned that "red traffic lights are optional on Sundays". I had briefly considered renting a car during my stay and touring about, but… maybe not.
We’re split up into two hotels; Titan got the nice hotel close to the compound, and Cyber and I are in an apartment complex about ten minutes away. The apartments apparently rent out on short-term bases and have a deal with the UN to house their personnel and visiting dignitaries. That probably explains the heavy gate. I hope it does not explain the plethora of prostitutes just outside of that gate.
(No, I did not take a picture of the prostitutes. Let's just move on.)
22 Sep 09 - In the morning, Cyber and I took a gamble and got a taxi to take us to the nearest supermarket. The taxi driver got us there, waited the 20 minutes for us to finish our shopping excursion, and drove us back. This cost, with tip, 600 shillings. That’s $8. Mmm, bargain! After a bit of rest, we met up with Titan for lunch and then visited the United Nations Office at Nairobi. This is about as big a shock to our system as anything else, as we’re accustomed to the Headquarters Office in New York, sitting on six narrow blocks’ worth of space, with a nice 40-story office building, a tiny garden, and that’s about it. Walking into UNON, you come to a security checkpoint, and beyond that is a whole bunch of green. You can’t even see the main complex because of all the trees.
We take a walk and find our offices, which are there at the security checkpoint at the entrance, and then walk further to the main compound. The cafeteria is a large open space with a café that’s open 24/7. There are some colorful birds flying around, some of which are inside the cafeteria because, hey, why not? We continue our casual walking tour, finding the long stretch of office buildings linked by open bridges, and then we see what is clearly the highlight of our stay in UNON: Monkeys. Lots of monkeys. If there was a list of selling points for why you would want to work for the United Nations Office at Nairobi, “monkeys” would have to be at the top of the list. You just can’t go wrong with monkeys.
I’d be lying if I said that we never stopped to look whenever a monkey came into sight. We’re such Americans. We also saw some stray cats, but whatever. Monkeys >>> cats.
Later that evening, Boss arrived from her office in central Africa and we went out to dinner. We also were assigned a car and driver who would take us to and from the office. More on that later. Boss and Titan were dropped off at their hotel, and Cyber and I were dropped off at our place. Cyber spends the night with the mosquito netting pulled over his bed. I do not. Naturally, he gets bitten three times.
Tune in next time when we go into more detail about other stuff. I'll be honest, there will probably be monkey pictures in the next post too. Who doesn't love monkeys? I mean, really?
First off, just to officially get it out of the way, come to Kenya; we got lions. That's right, I had to post this. That's the way these things go.
Or, if you don't want to read, maybe you need to take an energy drink. It'll make you appreciate Kenya more.
20 Sep 09 - Today we departed for Kenya. Our team consists of myself and two persons whom I’ll codename Cyber and Titan, as well as someone who would join us from Africa, codename Boss.
Cyber, Titan, and I meet up at JFK in the Swissair business lounge around 3:30 pm. The fact that we're here at all is amazing, since the people arranging our flights only authorized and issued our tickets eight hours before our actual travel time. Mmmm, tastes like disorganization. But that’s really par for the course for the preparation of this conference. Cheeky organizers. Considering they knew our names and official travel times two weeks in advance, that seemed unnecessary. But as always I digress.
The positive side: all official travel greater than nine hours total flying time is automatically done in business class. Woohoo, booze!
The negative side: Swissair’s business class does not stand up to many other business classes. Somehow we expected more from Switzerland. Although their lounge and meals all came with great cheese and chocolate. Good old predictable Switzerland. Spent the flight watching “The Matrix”, edited for TV (“Gosh darnit, Neo, you can’t do this!”), and then landing in Zurich International Airport. Cyber, who managed to get food poisoning the night before, survives the flight intact, if perhaps a little pale and green.
21 Sep 09 - We land in Zurich bright and early. The pilot announces that, due to fog conditions, the plane will be piloted by the computer. That's odd, I think; what kind of crazy-ass fog are they talking about? So I look out the window and see some cloud cover below us. We hit the clouds. Nothing special, really; just dense white clouds that you can't see through. I'm watching and waiting and all of a sudden WHUMP! The runway appears out of NOWHERE and we touch down. We're talking zero visibility here. My faith in computers steps up a notch; it was like flying into Steven King's "The Mist".
Zurich International Airport has to be the most boring and functional airport ever designed. See previous paragraph, “Good old predictable Switzerland”. The gate area looked like a giant warehouse with seats and garage doors. We are nearly the only people in an enormous waiting area. And, of course, the enormous windows showed us nothing but the densest layer of fog you've ever not seen through. However, a lot can be forgiven when Toblerone is for sale by the metric tonne. OM NOM NOM. We catch our transfer to Nairobi, and Cyber and I get mysteriously upgraded to First Class while Titan gets left behind in business class. She looks forlorn. We manage not to mock her, choosing instead to focus on the champagne and the incredibly malodorous person sitting to Cyber’s right. Cue Cloudkill, 10’ radius, save vs. poison or suffer horribly for eight hours in a small cabin of circulated air. It took a lot of champagne to ignore that.
We land in Nairobi at 7:00 pm local time (NYC+8 hours) and are greeted almost immediately by representatives from the local ministry. Thanks to their influence we encounter the fastest “get out of plane and airport” transition I’ve ever seen- in 20 minutes we were loaded up in a convoy and heading into town. Thus began our experience with local drivers.
Kenyans love to drive. They love mass transit. Their buses are big vans outfitted with lots of seats. They drive British style. And the rules of the road are very casual guidelines. For instance, passing. People pass without regard to: hills, opposing traffic, road size, lane size, car size, speed, pedestrians, sidewalks, bicyclists, and pretty much anything else that might come close to the road. We’ve seen some pretty good accidents where maybe passing didn’t work so well. We’ve seen four cars wide on two lanes of traffic. We’ve seen passes uphill and around a curve with maybe a dozen feet of space to spare. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. I’ve seen maybe four traffic lights anywhere; everything else is just self-monitored intersections and traffic circles, the bane of driverkind. Merging into traffic is like stabbing someone with a knife - just stick your car in hard and fast and hope for the best. One of our drivers even mentioned that "red traffic lights are optional on Sundays". I had briefly considered renting a car during my stay and touring about, but… maybe not.
We’re split up into two hotels; Titan got the nice hotel close to the compound, and Cyber and I are in an apartment complex about ten minutes away. The apartments apparently rent out on short-term bases and have a deal with the UN to house their personnel and visiting dignitaries. That probably explains the heavy gate. I hope it does not explain the plethora of prostitutes just outside of that gate.
(No, I did not take a picture of the prostitutes. Let's just move on.)
22 Sep 09 - In the morning, Cyber and I took a gamble and got a taxi to take us to the nearest supermarket. The taxi driver got us there, waited the 20 minutes for us to finish our shopping excursion, and drove us back. This cost, with tip, 600 shillings. That’s $8. Mmm, bargain! After a bit of rest, we met up with Titan for lunch and then visited the United Nations Office at Nairobi. This is about as big a shock to our system as anything else, as we’re accustomed to the Headquarters Office in New York, sitting on six narrow blocks’ worth of space, with a nice 40-story office building, a tiny garden, and that’s about it. Walking into UNON, you come to a security checkpoint, and beyond that is a whole bunch of green. You can’t even see the main complex because of all the trees.
We take a walk and find our offices, which are there at the security checkpoint at the entrance, and then walk further to the main compound. The cafeteria is a large open space with a café that’s open 24/7. There are some colorful birds flying around, some of which are inside the cafeteria because, hey, why not? We continue our casual walking tour, finding the long stretch of office buildings linked by open bridges, and then we see what is clearly the highlight of our stay in UNON: Monkeys. Lots of monkeys. If there was a list of selling points for why you would want to work for the United Nations Office at Nairobi, “monkeys” would have to be at the top of the list. You just can’t go wrong with monkeys.
I’d be lying if I said that we never stopped to look whenever a monkey came into sight. We’re such Americans. We also saw some stray cats, but whatever. Monkeys >>> cats.
Later that evening, Boss arrived from her office in central Africa and we went out to dinner. We also were assigned a car and driver who would take us to and from the office. More on that later. Boss and Titan were dropped off at their hotel, and Cyber and I were dropped off at our place. Cyber spends the night with the mosquito netting pulled over his bed. I do not. Naturally, he gets bitten three times.
Tune in next time when we go into more detail about other stuff. I'll be honest, there will probably be monkey pictures in the next post too. Who doesn't love monkeys? I mean, really?