Vacation in Kenya, Day 1

Well, I'm here for relaxation, but of course I brought a bit of work with me. I did make sure to sleep in a bit before heading to town. I grabbed a yogurt at the supermarket and had a nice exotic breakfast (I don't know why there is so little yogurt in Arusha, but I'm going to eat lots of it while I'm here).

I first stopped by a shop where we have some of our GCS stock and found out that the dealer hadn't been able to sell a single product. Then again, it's hard to sell products that are completely hidden in some storage room. From there, I went to the University of Nairobi to visit the director of the FabLab. I wanted to talk with him about IDDS, and though he had told me he was pretty busy, I figured that I could grab him for five minutes since I've always found it best to communicate with him in person. Unfortunately, after waiting there for 2 hours, I decided I would try my luck a different day.

I grabbed a fruit salad from a street vendor which was delicious and then grabbed a matatu to go to the Ghanaian High Commission in Nairobi on Limuru Road. I had seen on the map that I wanted the 106, 107 or 108, but since I wasn't in City Centre, I figured that a 105 that said Limuru would probably get me pretty close. An hour later, I was well on my way out of Nairobi in an area called Limuru which is nowhere near Limuru Road. Oops. I wish there were some culprit for that besides my own stupidity.

Well, I was a bit frustrated at this point, so I decided to head to the Sarit Centre to grab a snack and use some wireless internet. Once I got there, I discovered that the internet was down (though it was nice to have a bagel for the first time in nearly a year) and was about to give up on everything when my friend Maria saw me there and made it her mission to get me out of my funk.

Maria was one of the fellows at the Unreasonable Institute with me last summer, so we had lots to catch up on. I met her intern Aisha (sp?) and saw her apartment. We sat down for tea and swapped stories from the past year and hen we got into a long talk about business models and by the end I was feeling a lot better. She even let me use her internet to send off some emails (I'm going to be pretty far behind on those for most of this vacation). After that, I grabbed a matatu back to Upper Hill feeling a bit worn out, but generally positive about everything.