Automation

A picture of my street. Don't think I've posted one before? Local shop to the right. 

And a nice view of the sky over the rooftops the other night.

 

It's been a really nice week so far. A few friends are back in town. Solvejg is back with a view to returning permanently. We went out to our ladies' lunch club, about ten or twelve of us who meet up on a very irregular basis for food and conversation. I'd already had dinner, so I went straight for the chocolate mud cake, which was gloopily delicious.

Had a movie night with my neighbour, Didier. He's as hooked on Game of Thrones as I am, so we gathered together with snacks to watch the last ever episode.

What can I say? It happened.

Everyone who knows, knows what I mean.

My friend Harris is also back in town. We met up at PiliPili and amazingly our friend Andy was there playing a gig. He's the guitarist for Viva Beats, our favourite band in Kigali. He also put a string on the piano a while back. 

We did more live music at CasaKeza, where a band rocked up playing Bella Ciao from La Casa de Papel, one of our favourite series. They also had a cute little gecko audience.

 

 

 

Braved the wet season to go see Habyarimana's Palace, which he hadn't been to before. Really disappointing. It used to be this very strange house full of secret gun cupboards, snake pits, rooms for witch doctors and interrogations. Now, they've stripped the whole place down, declared that nothing of its history be told to tourists, and just hung paintings about the place. 

They've moved the art gallery from Nyanza to here. It really doesn't work. No information about any of the artists, no proper lighting, no café, no art-related gift shop. It's just a place to store art. The tour literally goes: 'painting, painting, painting, plane crash, painting,' with no context for why you're looking at a plane crash or what the house was all about. Personally, I think it was much more interesting before, but luckily it was National Museum Day, so we got in for free. 

Once the rain stopped enough that we could leave, we headed to Kisi for tilapia and a fair amount of daytime drinking. This was much more satisfying.

 

Harris works outside Kigali a lot, so often hires a car. I'd been talking about my mum and Merrick visiting later in the year, and considering transport options. I love driving in the UK, but don't own a car in Rwanda and have never had the courage to hire one. As Harris was back early and had some time before giving the car back, he offered to take me for a spin. He took me to collect some pet food from a clinic in Kicukiro, as it's situated along some really quiet back streets. 

It wasn't just my first time driving in Rwanda. It was my first time in an automatic. A truly mad experience. You can simply roll to a stop on a hill and it just stays there. No clutch, no gears, no handbrake - it's some form of witchcraft. 

It appears physically impossible to roll backwards into something, but knowing that and believing that are two separate things. After a lifetime of remembering to put the car in neutral, using the handbrake whilst parked, finding the bite and easing off the clutch, it felt like a total mind melt. It's supposed to make driving easier, but I felt anxious that I'd forgotten to do something. 

I did get used to it a lot faster than I was expecting though, and I have to say, I like it. The only thing I found a bit problematic was that there's not much control over acceleration for overtaking and pulling away from speed bumps. There is a sort of break point on the accelerator which, if you push down hard enough, thrusts it up a gear, but when you're used to controlling acceleration with a flick of your wrist, it's a little unnerving. When you really want the car to go, it sort of thinks about it. On the other hand, that makes it an excellent car for braving Kigali traffic. After a couple of laps  around the leafy suburbs, we headed for the open road. 

We did a little off-roading down a dirt track, which was excellent. It's a really great car for that. Then we got tangled up in the thick of a moto cloud at an unmanned junction where the traffic lights weren't working. About a thousand motos and thirty cars all bustling to get across the intersection. Fairly terrifying. Mirrors didn't help, because all you could see was a wall of motorbikes surrounding you. It wasn't so different from driving in London, though. Everybody moving so slowly you're unlikely to hit anything. I even practised my reverse parking (pictured). Harris was a star. He hardly screamed at all, and I only drove on the wrong side of the road once.

Last night was awesome fabulous. Went to Pacha Club in Kimironko with Maja and Vincent. Viva Beats were playing and Andy was on top form. I'll post some clips here later, once I have time to go through them. We danced until around 1 a.m. There was a large group of Burundians celebrating a birthday, so a lot of dancing going on. Had such a good time and burnt off a lot of energy. I'm finally feeling back to my old self again. Whatever I was sick with has passed and I'm back to normal.

Harris and his research assistant, Rose, are off visiting hospitals over the next week, and very kindly invited me along. They're going to be training, I'm going to be holidaying. Headed down to Cyangugu, then back up through Karongi. Will be nice to get out of Kigali for a bit. Proof copies of my latest novel arrived the other week, so I'll take them with me and get editing. 

Just Sign Here

Had a productive day, yesterday. Became a founding member of EBAR, the European Business Association Rwanda. Established to strengthen business ties between EU countries and Rwanda, and good for networking and sharing information about doing business in the country.

 

We were all there at 9 a.m. for the signing, so afterwards I headed to Kigali Art Centre and treated myself to a yummy breakfast.

 

 

Recovering from a month of being unwell. Shivers, aches and general yuck. All the tests came back clean so not sure what it was, but been dewormed for good measure.

It's currently avocado season, a half-hundred ton falling off the tree in my garden, which means I'm eating this for the next month:

Unfortunately, my cats have been lunching on the local wildlife. Brought in two birds this month and sadly neither survived, despite my attempt to build a safety nest for them to recover. People say you should just leave things once they're caught, but cats play with their food for hours.

 

I've been working on a lot of pianos lately. Bugesera Lodge just out of town has a 70-year-old piano they brought with them from Tanzania. It's not in great shape, so I'm trying to get it playing again. 

 In return, they feed me the most delicious meals.

The trip out there is lovely and green, with dramatic wet-season skies.

I've also started teaching technical English to one of my editing clients. I took a TEFL course about twelve years ago and this is the first time I've used it. It's actually quite good fun as we're exploring more advanced aspects of English and how to present complex information in an easy to understand way, rather than beginners' English. The classes are indoors when it's raining and outdoors when it's sunny.

There was a beautiful rainbow in the sky when I finished teaching yesterday. On the moto home it stretched right the way across the valley, but I was carrying a lot of stuff so couldn't take another photo.

 

Due to being ill, I went a month without alcohol. My friends Sameer and Justin were in town on Friday and helped remedy that with fabulous passion fruit mojitos at The Hut. I was worried one drink might floor me, but I survived.

So, it has been a time of good food and recovery lately. Hopefully got my mum and Merrick coming out to visit later this year. If you would like to visit Rwanda, RwandAir has a special offer - 30% off flights if you book before 20th May 2019.

25

 

Beautiful blue sky, one of the last before the rainy season kicked in. Tried my hand at making carrot cake for the first time. Then it called for icing sugar and I gave up on the topping, but the cake was good, if a little crumbly and burnt at the edges. It's very difficult to cook something evenly in a bucket oven. 

 

The blue sky was from my trip to the Irembo head office. I had to apply for a police clearance certificate to help out my friend. I'm now a founding member of the European Business Forum. Not sure what that means yet, as it's just getting underway, but happy to help out. Although, I did have to clarify that, as a Brit, I'd still be eligible to join after Brexit.

Irembo HQ have a very pretty view from their office. Picking up the police clearance was less entertaining. You get it from a very official government building. There's absolutely no signposts, and they've implemented a one-way system for traffic - and pedestrians. You can't go through the Exit gate, which is right next to the office you need to go to, so you walk all the way down the road, asking people where the entrance is, enter the Entrance gate, go do your thing (which takes a while, in a room packed to the walls with people waiting), then walk out, make it back to the gate you came in, only to be told you need to walk the other way. Again, no signposts, and of course the security guard isn't going to show you himself, so you end up standing under the beating sun in the middle of a car park, desperately wondering whether someone's going to find your remains in a couple of weeks. I still haven't been to pick up my new ID card because I just can't quite face the system. If the future of automation means you go in, press a button on a vending machine and get your papers dispensed, I'm all for it. People are great, but, in the grand scheme of things, we're pretty inefficient.

Although Harris and I were quite efficient one night, even after several beers, when we packaged up a load of mobile phones for his staff to take into the field next day. He's working on a project to help people identify and manage diabetes better in rural areas.  

More yummy treats through the post. My lovely cousin Tamsin and her partner Guido (from the Hague), posted me a birthday supply of Kokos Brood, which is absolutely delightful. As Guido said: basically, just sugar. But it's coconut flavoured sugar, so very nice.

Also, Harris's parents came to visit. They brought me a big box of Greek chocolates. It took me a while to figure out what the strange flavour was - chocolate covered chestnuts!

And my fabulous friend Inike also came, with a box of the most delightful biscuits I've ever had in my life, and a good helping of chocolate.

 

Sadly, just after Harris's parents went home, he came down with food poisoning. And I know you mustn't laugh, but a doctor needing to see a doctor... I really shouldn't have laughed, because I came down with food poisoning the very next day! Different source, I took a chance on some leftovers in the fridge and shouldn't have done. But, what a pair.

Got better in time to attend a pizza party at our friend Jo's house. She has a lovely view of the hills and Harris took this picture of the rain passing over.

Unfortunately, I came down with another bout of slight fever a couple of weeks later and have been pretty poorly since. The fever wasn't high and I think it was just food poisoning again, but it's wiped me out. No energy. Spent a lot of time in bed with Netflix. 

During this bout of sickness, one of my cats brought in a bird. I rescued it and nursed it for a couple of days, but sadly it didn't make it. It couldn't fly and I wasn't physically able to take it somewhere safe. There aren't any bird sanctuaries for this sort of thing in Kigali and none of the vets could help. If I'd released it, the cats would have got it again. Some might say that would have been better, but I couldn't do it. I do love my cats, but they kill everything.

In other wildlife news, found this green hawk moth at a guy's house whilst fixing his piano.

And ibex on my garden wall. Very noisy birds, but very impressive.

The rainy season has come on strong at the moment. It also marks the 25th anniversary of the Genocide Against the Tutsi. I was thirteen when I watched it on the news in my mum's front room, thirteen years later I moved to Rwanda as a VSO volunteer. A lot has changed since then. It's quite hard to comprehend just how far the country has come since 1994. A real testament to human resilience.

Kwibuka

The night before memorial starts, many people go to the bars and get a bit tipsy, because a lot of the bars close over memorial. Harris and I had been for a meal and were walking home late at night. We were a bit tipsy ourselves, as he introduced me to the joys of Hendrix gin with cucumber (honestly, try it). We met a group of men walking the other way and all stopped for an impromptu hug.

It is always a strange atmosphere. The city falls completely silent for a week. It's always a fairly quiet city, but I mean absolutely silent. You can sit out of an evening and not hear a car, not hear a note. 

In other noise-related news, the night club I had so much trouble with last year has been turned into a rather nice Lebanese café and guest house. Popped over for falafel and coffee the other day. Much nicer.

My house from their garden - you can see why the night club was a problem.

At present, all is well. Just trying to get better physically. I've had a lodger staying the past month and she's off home today, so I'll spend a few more days lying on the couch then try to get back to normal. I have a couple of pianos to tune and some English lessons to plan for a local company. Possibly some more editing for GIZ. Thankfully, it's been a quiet time whilst I've been sick so I've had plenty of rest.