Day 1:
Julian, it would seem, has already established himself as the special case in the group, and given the group of people we’re with, that’s quite an accolade. Though to his credit, despite missing his original coach to Bristol, he caught one a few hours later, found Simon, retrieved his passport, caught a later than planned coach back to Heathrow, and startled all of us by being there before we arrived.
Heathrow’s customs and security went as smoothly as could be hoped and only one of the 12 of us was asked to ‘step this way’ by a man pulling on some disposable latex gloves. But it wouldn’t be fair on Andan if I were to reveal which of us received this pleasure. Time (and no doubt some other things) being a little tight by this time, we set off as briskly as our east London swaggers would allow, towards our gate, and onto our plane.
The plane journey itself was spent in various states of consciousness and was, surprising, rather calm and sedate. At least it was until the pilot decided he wanted to test the suspension upon landing. We were greeted by Kevin’s dad Duncan and the pastor of the church we’ve been staying in, Nicholas. They both used their quite impressive political sway to move us to the head of the passport control queue and waved us passed customs.
After half an hour or so, split between two very cramped minibuses, we arrived at the AIC hostel, were shown to our comfortable, if slightly cramped rooms, and were then presented with a feast of rice, meat, things that apparently are vegetables and other things I’d never seen before. It was bloody nice though and we scoffed the lot.
That night, bed time meant bed time (things seem to have changed since then…) and no sooner had our heads hit the lumpy pillows, we were fast asleep. Well actually, it was more like half an hour after, due to the insane heat in the rooms, but we slept pretty soundly nonetheless.
Day 2:
Next morning, Duncan presented us with the lyrics to a Swahili song and told us we had all of two hours to learn it before we’d be performing to a few hundred people in church. Okay, so it’s only two lines long, but still… it scared the b’jesus outta me!
So time ticked swiftly on and inevitably, we found ourselves, all dressed in identical bright red t shirts, sitting in the front row of a rather large and rather crowded church. Just short of two thousand people, we’re told… ‘a few hundred,’ I think not. The service, up until our arrival on stage was a pretty slick affair; for once, I managed not to fall asleep in church! It seemed such a shame to end the service with a highly discordant, semi-improvised, badly pronounced Swahili song, but that we did, and it went down almost as well as the lead balloon that my stomach had turned to.
After church was lunch and then a visit into the centre of Nairobi. An hour or so’s walk took us through poverty stricken roads (no doubt more will be said on road conditions here in later blogs), crowded market places – imagine being kicked repeatedly in the face by one giant special offer (for you only!) – a really quite presentable financial district, and finally a supermarket where we bought some tea bags.
Upon request of nearly all of us, we visited a bar, some way out of town, to watch the Man U – Chelsea Community Shield match. To the dismay of all the filthy glory hunters among us, and therefore the delight of everyone else, Chelsea won. As you can imagine, the Matatu bus back into town was full of typical Man Utd excuses… mostly revolving around the ref.
Anyway, back in town, we had to find our way home, so another Matatu was in order. This one though, was a bit different to anything else we’d travelled in thus far. Imagine if you will, a bus decorated in vivid neon-pink, posters of various singers, gangsters and people who I do believe are referred to as ‘webbies’ and messages of all kinds, ranging from the evangelistic to the down right offensive. Now add to this, some very loud music, a bumpy road and an interesting take on safe driving speeds, and you have yourself something that’s probably not quite as good as the bus we were in.
Back at the hostel, dinner, though remarkably similar to both the lunch earlier and yesterday’s dinner, was devoured was just as much pleasure as it had been the day before and seemed to provide everybody with renewed stores of energy, just in time for bed.
Now I’m not going to speculate on exactly what was going on in the two rooms at the end of the corridor that evening, but it sounded extremely erm… controversial, shall we say? It certainly wasn’t the sound of six boys sleeping, that’s for sure.
Right, I’m done… A combination of laziness and illiteracy within our group might mean that blogs fall behind schedule, are completely incomprehensible or involve lots of words like skeen and chung. I apologise in advance for this.
Jesu- I mean err... Matt
