We're spending the day in downtown Kigali before we go to Gashora later this afternoon. We visited a supermarket called Nakumatt (a superstore that I am particularly familiar with) where some of the team bought groceries (like peanut butter) and we also visited a second supermarket called Simba to buy soccer balls. Lama, our host partner and guide, took us to a mall so we could look for a basketball net (which we didn't find but bought some jump ropes). We've been waiting for our last team member to land in Kigali because she had missed her connecting flight last night. We split the team so that one group headed to the airport to pick her up. So here we are, half of a team around a plastic covered table in a Chinese restaurant at the top floor of the Chinese mall. This is the perfect spot to have a restaurant. There are pretty much no walls, just a roof. No windows, just open space where we can see out onto the green and brown rolling hills. Up near the top of the hills, it's nice and green but farther down to the base of the hills, the hills turn brown with dusty, and rusty rooftops of huts, and the red dirt roads.
Before i forget to mention this, on the bus ride into the city I spotted a man on a motorcycle - a boda-boda. He was a motorcycle-taxi driver. And this man, I kid you not, was texting as he was riding the motorcycle. He was doing this with no hands! Crazy... Only in Africa...
I also saw something rather rare in Africa (at least in the places i've been to): I saw traffic lights!! The cool thing is that they count down way longer than Toronto traffic lights do. You know how the traffic lights start counting down from 10-20 seconds? Well in Rwanda, they count from 60 (maybe more as that's the number I saw when we passed by... It could be a higher number).
I'll give you my TTAA later tonight when we get to Gashora!
M
Mali Foster
DWC Participant
Rwanda, July 2012
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