First day in Africa

What was the last I wrote? Oh, yeah, I was waiting for my friend Katrín at the University of Nairobi, where we’d decided to meet. I called her when she had been on the road for about two hours (which is a normal traveling time from Nakuru, where she lives, to Nairobi) and then she told me that she’d be there in about two more hours: “the roads are really bad right now.” Your schedule has to be quite flexible in this place...
So I waited... blogged, emailed and drew in my travel diary: first I drew the giraffe Daisy, that I’d met in the morning at the Giraffe Centre, then I tried to draw the Kenyan flag: black, red and green with a shield and two spears. That one didn’t really come out too well, so I decided to finish my drawing of the German Parliament. Tourists are allowed to go up on the roof, to this glass house that has a view over whole Berlin...
And at the platform at the top of the glass house there was this woman... well... should I really be telling this story?... It was one of the most embarrassing moments I’ve ever witnessed... Well, anyway, there was this lady crouching, right where you walk up to the platform. “Hmm, she must be tired,” I thought as I walked just past her. I would have been tired too, walking around in those shoes: she was wearing high needlepin heels. I didn’t give it any more thought before going on to admire the view. Until the smell reached me... I froze and didn’t dare look back: “no, it can’t be,” I thought, “it just can’t be!”
I had to look. And my suspicion was confirmed. The poor woman had liquid diarrhoea and just hadn’t been able to reach a toilet. I hadn’t noticed at first because she was wearing a skirt and could therefore drop what she had to drop without first dropping her trousers. But there she was. Surrounded by tourists up on the platform and they just kept on coming, right past her.
I don’t want to laugh though, this may very well happen to me when I catch some nasty tropical disease.

But we’re in Kenya now, let’s keep to kenyan stories.
Katrin came in the afternoon, after a shaky journey on the great kenyan roads. We met at the AIESEC office at the University, as agreed. The guys I had been hanging around with invited us to some AIESEC party in the evening. We thought it would be at the university, but when we met up with the guys again, after just having gone for a quick bite, we headed downtown. “Where are we going?” we asked. “To the Hilton,” came the answer.
So there I was, weary after more than twenty-four hours of traveling and running in airports, had hardly slept in the night in the plane, still wearing my creased and dirty traveling clothes that weren’t very fancy in the first place, on my way to a cocktail party at the Nairobi Hilton Hotel.
When too many sponsors came up to hold too long speaches, me and Katrin sneaked out of there to explore the surroundings. We went down to the ground floor to check out the swimming pool, “maybe we’ll come down for a few laps in the morning if we can be bothered,” we told the very nice security guard. Then we went up to the seventeenth floor for some view but were very disappointed that there was no view from the hallway, only from the rooms. But the very nice cleaning staff we met up there let us sneak into room 1708, which was vacant that night, just to have a peek over Nairobi at nighttime.

Not wanting to spend 12.000 shillings on a room at the Hilton (which is still far less than I expected, about $180), we left for our free accommodation at a friend of Katrin’s place. As she wasn’t home yet, we dropped into the second fancy hotel that evening, the Pan-African. Still not very presentable, we nevertheless got excellent service from Peter the porter, who kept our luggage while we sat down at the bar to wait for Hokman, this Hong Kong-ese friend of Katrin.
And finally at midnight, about thirty-six hours after leaving Thorhildur and Tobias in Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany, I could lay down for a well-deserved rest.