The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Tale of Two Cities

This is what I remember. The dust that saturates the air that it seems to fall from the sky onto your clothes and coats the inside of your lungs. The heat that wraps around you and takes the breath the dust has left you. This is real Africa with the smells and constant sounds of birds and trucks - with random bits of North American music carried on the air mixed with shouts of a foreign language as you walk down the street.
We (my Kenyan colleagues and I) have been joking about how South Africa is like Europe with civilized traffic and clean streets where no one comes up to talk to you. There are lovely cappuccino bars and fancy restaurants. Now we are in Kenya where the streets are lined with mudpuddles and barbed-wire and people are selling shoes, belts, candy and Safaricom cell phone minutes out of shacks by the side of the road. What's funny is that the latter is oddly comforting to me. There are so many similarities between Kenya and Malawi which is so nice but we definitely had some culture shock coming from the beauty and opulence of Cape Town.
When we arrived in our fourth floor walk-up apartment in Nairobi in the middle of the night we were greeted by bright green furniture and 10-foot ceilings cascading light from minimalist incandescent lightbulbs. The furniture is reminiscent of something my grandparents would find vintage and the only decoration is a large poster of fruit that says "the ripest fruit first falls" - the type of poster that you would find in the recesses of a church basement. The bathrooms (there are two) are overwelmed with large toilets made of grey marble that look hilariously awkward and are as unreliable as I remember previous encounters with their kind. Cian's "crib" is possibly from 1920 and he loves it because the mosquito net is hysterical to him. Needless to say coming from our gorgeous apartment in Cape Town this was a bit of a shock but in the morning light things didn't seem to look as bad and although we looked around a bit the great thing about this apartment is that it's within walking distance to work for me and within walking distance to the shopping centre for Keith and it has internet which is a huge bonus. There are pictures on the slideshow of the apartment if people want to see them. So here we remain at Samra apartments http://www.samraapartments.com/.