Greetings from Nairobi...

Whew. That was a long trip. After barely surviving back-to-back redeye flights (LA to London, London to Nairobi), I miraculously met Shashank at the airport on Wednesday morning in Nairobi without any major difficulties. Fortunately, despite being the capital of Kenya, Nairobi’s is a pretty small airport – I guess these Kenyans, unsurprisingly, don’t have a lot of dough to be globetrotting all over the place.

Shashank had told me in previous conversations that Nairobi is very much a city divided into two – not necessarily geographically, but culturally / socioeconomically. There’s the ‘locals’ i.e. the native Kenyans, where poverty and unemployment is widespread, and there’s the ‘whites’ – which pretty much applies to any professionals or expats, regardless of skin color, with leisure time and money to burn. Shashank and myself, for example, qualify as white. Don’t worry. I promise not to return to the U.S. and demand tax cuts and gay marriage bans.

The contrast was apparent within 30 minutes of my arrival. There was the taxi ride from the airport to Shashank’s apartment, which was pretty much what you’d expect of a taxi ride in a country such as Kenya. Crowded roads, a lot of noise, and people roaming everywhere. No cows though – which combined with the skin color of the natives was probably the only thing distinguishing Nairobi from a major Indian city. Soon, we arrived at Shashank’s apartment complex, which is basically a series of six 3- or 4-floor buildings with maybe 10 apartments in each building, surrounding parking spaces, all protected by a locked gate complete with unarmed security. While far from modern by Western standards (e.g. no elevators), it’s obvious his place is upscale by East African standards. As soon as we walked into his apartment, we were greeted by Joyce, Shashank’s twice-a-week maid, who made us coffee when we arrived and left soon after (because Shashank, dodging bullets/machetes/whatever else while in Darfur, somehow forgot to stock up on laundry detergent, so she couldn’t do the wash).

The apartment – again, for your average East African – is fit for a king. Two bedrooms, two baths (keep in mind Shashank lives by himself), living room with satellite TV, kitchen with relatively modern appliances, and a large office that I am writing this from, complete with unreliable internet service, a printer, and a fax machine that may or may not work. All for the basement-bargain price of around $670/month. I may have to consider moving here for a while as I pay off my soon-to-be-incurred business school debt.

Don’t get too jealous of Shashank just yet though. While he has it better than your average person out here, he still has to deal with stuff that we Westerners take for granted. There constantly seems to be something wrong with his apartment – a nonworking sink is today’s culprit. As we went out to get lunch, he was upset to discover that his mechanic had dropped his Land Cruiser off with practically no gas. He was even more upset to discover that his car wouldn’t start. Starving as we were, we called a cab and, while waiting, kept trying to start the car. Eventually, it worked, so we cancelled the cab, and headed to the gas station to refuel. Not surprisingly, the car didn’t start there either, so we had to utilize the manual transmission for a rolling jumpstart in 2nd gear. Shashank figured all the problems were just because his car hadn’t been driven regularly in a few weeks, a hypothesis that seemed proven when the car started fine an hour later after lunch. At this point Shashank called his mechanic and told him everything was fine. Five hours later, we tried to head out to pick up some dinner. Car wouldn’t start. Only now we were in a parking lot, so the rolling jumpstart thing wouldn’t really work. Thankfully Shashank had one frozen pizza left over at his apartment, and I think the mechanic is here as we speak.

Anyways, I’ve been here close to 24 hours now. Apparently, there isn’t a lot to do in or around Nairobi (thanks for telling me this before I decided to come here for six weeks, Shashank), so I spent most of yesterday getting settled, eating proper food for the first time in a week after the 7-11 coffee, Jamba Juice, vodka, jagermeister and beer that dominated my diet while I was in California, and sleeping off most of my jetlag. Will spend today (Thursday) exploring Nairobi a bit, and then tomorrow Shashank and I fly out to Mombasa for a romantic weekend at the beach.