Tuesday, July 21, 2009

A cool town-Nairobi

It was a nice, cool and refreshing feeling when I first arrived at Nairobi. Throughout rest of the trip in East Africa, I had returned to and stayed at Nairobi for several times. It was between rain and dry season or something like that the first time I arrived at Nairobi. When being asked about what season we are in now, the locals seem quite confused as well and often give an obscure or a very different answer than others. So the best way to tell the season is to feel it. The first time I was in Nairobi was "cool season" and the last time I stayed and left from Nairobi was "warm season" in mid October.
People seem cool and not much into intervening tourists. That's especially true in the business area of Nairobi downtown and upmarket suburbs.
I stayed at Nairobi Youth Hostel on a nice outskirt of Nairobi. In the same neighborhood, are there several state of the art medical centers and a Java house brewing the real coffee and making the same quality and types of pastries as you could get in Starbucks Coffee stores in US, if not more. I was surprised to see a Northeast Chinese restaurant standing tall with a Chinese style red bronze gate cross street. I strolled in and had some authentic hometown food and chatted with some hometown fellows at the African style corridor like dinning set served by a few nicely dressed and polite local young men. That was my first meal in East Africa.

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