First Day in Nairobi

As I write this I am enjoying Samosas and a local Nairobi beer at Mary Oberembt's house in the Riverside area. Mary's LA staff came prepared with their Wii and her Nairobi staff came with their hospitality and enthusiasm.

The picture at the right is of me and my travelling partner on this trip, Dave Tuttle. We had successfully braved over 24 hours of travel to arrive in Nairobi at 7am. Our driver, Jasan, met us and took us straight to our hotel to check in, get unpacked, take a quick shower and get something to eat.

The drive from the airport took almost an hour through the crazy Nairobi traffic. There were times we were stopped for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Nairobi has really improved since the last time I was here. Many of the main streets have been repaved, and you can see that there is a lot of work being done to put in sidewalks and other projects to beautify the streets.

After refreshing at the hotel we were off to the Nairobi office to get to work. The staff there was very happy to see me, because they had a chance to get their database issues solved in real time, not delayed 11 hours by the distance between us.

Mary had me driven over to her house so that I could finish working on the database application that will run the tournaments over the next few weeks in peace. She knew that I would be hard-pressed to get work done with her staff taking advantage of my presence there.

On the drive to Mary's, I saw that although the roads have improved the vehicles on them have not. The picture on the right was a heavy big-rig truck with one of the inside tyres (that's how they spell it here) completely shredded. Amazing.

It's 9pm here now, and Mary is promising dinner will be ready soon. It looks like I've made it through my first day here ok, illness, jetlag and all.