Walking to Work

It was such a pretty day that I thought I'd walk to work today.

Today was a travel day for much of our staff. Tomorrow we will be conducting tournaments in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, so teams of our staff were off to the airport early this morning bound for Kampala and Dar es Salaam while I stayed here in Nairobi with Mark and Raj, two of our question writers from Los Angeles.

There were no set plans on what time we were due at the office, and no arrangements had been made for Jasan to pick us up in the company van, so after talking it over at breakfast we decided to test our geographical memory and try walking the one mile or so to the office.

It truly was beautiful weather for a walk, and we were grateful for the opportunity to get away from our computers and spend some time outdoors. Lucky for us that Nairobi is a pretty safe place if you stick to public areas during daylight, because the three of us white guys strolling along those streets wearing shorts and carrying our laptops were definitely out of place.

We snapped some photos on the way, making us stand out even more as the tourists that we were.

"Rehabilitated Public Toilet" means that that facility had been upgraded to include plumbing and that you could expect to sit on a porcelain toilet and not hover over a hole in the floor.











On our way we passed through the campus of the University of Nairobi.













That's Raj posing in front of their sign.














A close-up of the very impressive logo of the University of Nairobi.

Finding our way there was harder than you think, because the roads in Nairobi can be very hard to negotiate in a car. Almost all of the roads have median strips in the center, and very often you have turn left when you want to go right and look for the u-turn lane after a few hundred metres. Also, most of the major intersections are traffic-circles so it's not too obvious to a passenger in a vehicle to which direction his driver exited. Our walking route was much more direct than the circuitous route Jasan uses.

Also, pedestrians and motor vehicles have negotiated an uneasy relationship where pedestrians are not afraid to step into oncoming traffic because they know that the cars will avoid them, although just barely. An additional risk for us as pedestrians is that they drive on the wrong side of the road here, so your instincts are to look to the left as you step off of the curb, not right, which can get you killed very quickly if you're not careful.

We managed to brave the risks and arrived at the office with no problems at all. I'm looking forward to making the walk again soon.