Summer Camp…with guard dogs

Today was my first real day in Nairobi (I didn’t spend it sleeping or holed up in the apartment, and actually went to work). Nairobi is very much a city, and while everything is definitely much grittier than the West, it sometimes doesn’t quite sink in that this is Africa. My office has internet and conference rooms and cubicles and coffee breaks – it’s only when you step outside that you notice the heavy cast iron doors and barbed wire surrounding the parking lot. The same thing is true in the suburbs outside the office. The supermarkets, cafes, the great vegetarian Indian place that L. has declared her favorite new restaurant, all feel like they could be anywhere. They have English menus, world cuisine and low prices – thoroughly modern until the guy selling souvenirs comes up to your table to try and sell you assorted overpriced handicrafts (hapana asante – no, thank you in Swahili).

The upside of this is that it makes settling in easier – my apartment feels a lot like summer camp, with lumpy, single mattress beds, a tile shower with low water pressure, and laundry day. Even the nighttime porch conversations are in English, between neighbors roughly our age. It is the heavy door, TV constantly on Aljazeera (more on that later) and the guard dogs from the neighboring compounds that bark during the night that remind you that we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

The downside of not quite feeling as foreign as expected is that both adapting to differences and showing the right level of vigilance takes that extra effort. Walking to lunch in broad daylight, a 4 minute stroll, requires the extra consideration to stay single file to accommodate the dilapidated path that serves as a sidewalk. And forget about going out by yourself at night, or about walking anywhere farther than 3 minutes at lunch.

Similarly, it takes some adjusting to the fact that just because your modem gives you internet, Gmail still may take 3 minutes to load in html. And don’t even think you’re going to get Hulu or Pandora. Just because something looks like normal doesn’t mean it works like it.

Nevertheless, even if the city is an uneasy mix between the familiar and the uniquely African, it holds the promise of totally unusual experiences. Safaris, rafting, mountains, coast – all a short flight or drive away – as long as you can handle driving stick on the wrong side of the road.