Looks like Livingstone: One day at the fair

The city of Nairobi is full of somewhat conflicting and confusing sights and sounds.
Like watching a large yellow bus with the clearly marked text "School Safety Bus",
approaching a round-about at roughly 90 km/h, then just barely slowing down and with screetching
tyres completely bomb through the whole thing and when exiting almost killing a person
crossing the road.

Or when being in the middle of a conversation about something seemingly
completely different hearing our neighbour Eddy Mo saying; "What do you think of the elephant?"

Confusion was also something there was plenty around to be had last week, when myself and Nils got the opportunity to follow our supervisor Dr Simiyu to the annual Agricultural Fair/Exhibition of Nairobi just in the outskirts of town. First of all, this was our first real trip away from our by now well-known hoods around Kileleshwa. And it was also the first real time with longer exposure in the Nairobi traffic. Both of these facts made us aware that this would indeed be one intense day. Dr Simiyu, by us almost always called by his first name "Justus", was a skilled driver when navigating the sometimes almost impenetrable and the moment later very dissolving and dynamic traffic. He kept repeating the mantra "you have to be tactical!", something which he time after time proved to be true. Driving in Nairobi is like playing chess. With the tiny change that if you make the wrong move you might in the worst case get squashed by that big yellow "School Safety Bus" that is charging down the other lane. But again, Justus turned out to be an excellent driver so we made it to our destination without even a scratch. After finding a parking space in the quite rough parking area we walked towards the exhibition area.

In intensity and feeling it might be compared with the infamous scene from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", where the two main characters Raul Duke and Dr Gonzo enter the very weird and "in-your-face-place" of Bazooko's Circus. "So they let us through the turn-stiles and turned us loose inside". When we got in it was an explosion of sights and sounds. A wall of people walking between different stands of exhibitors ranging from big corporate banana farms, technical universities and sellers of heavy farm equipment. A little further up the main walk path was two guys on huge stilts, making them a good bit over four meters tall and thus walking over the crowd, trying to impose their message of commercialism on the crowds through shouts and loud music. Me and Nils just put our maximum concentration into following Justus' neck as he cruised through the masses of people. After what seemed like as a much longer distance than it actually was we arrived at the University of Nairobi's exhibition building. Yes, the more prominent of the exhibitors actually has proper buildings standing on the exhibition grounds. They are there all year round, even though they are only used one week per year for the exhibition. In there we had the chance to have a chat with our friend and colleauge David "Karibe" Karfes and look at this years addition to the exhibition; a spectrum analyzer for determining when a fruit is ripe for picking and a robotic arm completely built and programmed by students at the university.

After leaving our stuff we felt like exploring. Justus gave us a friendly explanation about what the area looked like (there were no maps at all), but unfortunately the only thing that we really understood was that the area was REALLY BIG. So we just started roaming around at random to see what we would find. Among the more interesting things were:

A group of prisoners dancing and singing to very loud music dressed in cartoon-like, black and white shirts and trousers.
Almost any place with any self-esteem would have a live choir singing outside their exhibition place. So also the University of Nairobi.
In Kenya you are not allowed to sell beer before 3 p.m., something that an angry food-lady mumbled to Nils when he tried to buy one of the bottles she had behind the counter.
It is absolutely normal to have people in camoflage uniforms (sometimes also know as military or "soldiers") walking around in broad daylight at a fairground with huge, sharp loaded and uncocked machineguns.

Something worth working for!

Dazed and confused

Loitering

All of this excitement was enough for us for the time being. So we thought we needed something cooling, nice and bubbly to drink. So we went back to the UoN (University of Nairobi) place to look for Justus. Or well, we were actually more or less lost, but by chance we just suddenly came up beside the building, not really knowing how we got there. So anyway we asked Justus if he knew any place where we could get beer. He said that he had come across one the other day when some guy insisted that he needed a couple of beers when he was just walking by. And then he was kind enough to show us the place, which was the exhibition of a local brewery. But we had trouble again with the Kenyan laws. "No beer before three o' clock!". A well, now that we had already gone here we might as well do the small tour and smell the different types of hops and malt that they displayed in big bags. Didn't exactly make you less thirsty for beer... Neither did the huge pileups of beer bottles. But when we reached the end of the tour, as a miracle and all of a sudden, the "three-o-clock-rule" was unruled! We were led to the back yard which was a big outdoor bar. And before we knew it we were sitting with two locally produced stouts in our hands. Cheers to that!

After we had killed a couple of hours drinking different kinds of beers, in a futile attempt to at least seem a little bit cultivated and not like just the average beer-swiller, we took to the streets again. This time filled with courage and thinking that we should probably try and at least get some work done here. And we needed not look for long. Work came for us, and grabbed us, or at least Nils while I was busy handling the cameras. When walking one of the paths Nils was completely kidnapped by a very flamboyant looking ladyboy, and shortly after that a banana-republic-style dictator joined in. I was just busy trying to take as many pictures as possible. It turned out that they were promoting one of Kenya's largest telecom operators. Not quite sure what the advertisement had with that to do, but well. And since we had such fun together with them they thought that we might as well go inside and talk to someone. So we did, and we tried to figure out if they could offer us a good deal on sim-cards for our device (since it will utilise GPRS for remote connectivity). And after that we also went to talk to their competitors and the biggest telecom company in Kenya; Safari-Com. So after that we were very content and felt that we had done an excellent days work indeed. So we walked back to the basecamp to meet up with Justus to ride with him home. Turned out that UoN had won a number of awards, including two first prices for the robot and fruit-analyzer! So indeed it was a great day for all of us, both beer-drinkers and hard-workers.