WEIRD BIG CITY MIX

After three months of Musanze provincial life, I decided it was time for a big-city weekend. Kigali it was, of course, and the weekend was truly amazing.

Actually, it started already on Wednesday afternoon, when I was summoned to our Rwanda headquarters for several meetings. Luckily, the office is on the same beautiful property as my Guatemalan boss's private residence, so, before I realized, I spend two days a-la-Antigua together with him and his incredible family. Unfortunately, I was unable to produce much content in Spanish (since for the past months I've hung out mostly with Italians, so the mix is bad in my head again)... Otherwise, though, what a sweet family-style pre-weekend, with great Central American dishes, good wine, and lovely conversations.

On Friday, excitement was mounting: Meda, my good friend from Cluj, was supposed to arrive. Luckily, she had far less adventure than I did on my way to Africa, so I picked her up at the airport exactly on time, with all her luggage intact. We were invited to spend the weekend at Beth's - my Kenyan colleague - but as she was still engaged elsewhere, Meda and I chose one of the fanciest spots in Kigali for lunch, great Rwandan coffee-based products, and loooots of catching up. Bourbon Cafe was a real treat for several hours, just in preparation for the looong evening/night that was awaiting us.

Accompanied by Beth and a lovely Ugandan-Rwandan guy, Mujisha, we first had dinner at an Indian restaurant and then started the club-hopping phase, since Friday nights are really THE nights to party in Rwanda. But because we started too early (around 10), it took some 2 hours of trying and several spots of checking out until we finally got our stamps at KBC and unleashed the dancing for some 2 hours. Great music and amazingly-looking people, of course, but since Meda was falling apart after her journey we called it a night around 2.

Since this was also my first casual visit to Kigali, I was as much a tourist as she was. And what else do you do in the Rwandan capital on a Saturday morning other than spend it at the Genocide Memorial... BRRRRRRRRRRRR is all I can say about this place (just thinking that several hundred thousand people, hacked by machetes in a few weeks, are buried there, and you are pretty much at the end of your wits. Of course, the horrendous Belgian-connections were reinforced everywhere, so another weird experience on that topic.)

To somehow be able to complete the day without hitting utter depression, we went shopping - first for foods in a fancy and EXTREMELY expensive supermarket, then back to Bourbon Cafe for a... burger, and then to a souvenir shop (where, yes, I bought some green dresses and matching accessories.) Beth then convinced us to go get golden in a Senegalese back-alley store, so here we were buying long "vipuli" (yes, exactly, "ear-rings" in Swahili). All set for the night, we went out again - this time to the famous Kenyan joint in town.

Extremely tired and readily dizzy after a couple of Tusker beers, we started looking around and mingling. We were dearly adopted by these imposing men (all middle-aged, married, with wives back in Kenya...), who were all dishing out 'country-manager' business cards in different areas (airlines, auditing firms, etc.) It was just the best evening in terms of laughing since I got to Africa, and even if we just wanted to take it easy for a couple of hours, we ended up in this super cool club, Cadillac, way after midnight.

The adventure was just about to begin, though. Beth's landlady, who apparently has a ferocious dog let loose at night, would not pick up her phone at 2.30 a.m., which meant that we could not go back and open the gates to the property. Stranded in Kigali, we were rescued by Mutua, one of the guys in the group, who just offered us his PALACE for the night (some 20+ rooms that villa had...) Of course we all just slept peacefully!

:-)

Sunday morning, we invited Mujisha to a Romanian-type breakfast (with delicious salami Meda had brought over), and then we followed the trail of the odd-mixing weekend, by going to two villages (Ntamara and Nyamata) with more genocide memorials. These two, however, were haunting in a much more personal, direct way: the sites we visited were former Catholic churches, where Tutsis had hoped to find refuge, but where thousands of them were slaughtered instead. The buildings are full of blood stains and contain all the shredded clothes and decayed belongings of everyone who was butchered there. Honestly, the stench of death is still so pervasive that you get the creeps in a matter of seconds. The fact that you walk through shelves of skulls and walls of bones does not make it any easier............

So yes, clubbing and genocide memorials combined, this is what our fabulous weekend consisted of. I crowned it all with Amaretto (brought from Roma) and pufuleti (fetita cu bicicleta, of course, brought from Cluj), and returned to Musanze on Sunday night with a record two mosquito bites-only.