Friday night in Kigali (3-14-08)

So tonight is the night folks from the bush come into town, and folks in town find friends and go cruisin' - so there's a ton of TRAFFIC. Yep, good ol' smog chokin' bumper-to-bumper cars and trucks and busses and motorcylces and pedestrians and bicyclists. So we opted to wander over to the Novotel hotel (next door) for a drink to kill time. Get this

So at the Novotel, if you're not a guest, you can still participate like a guest - you pay 4,000 francs (about $7), and you get anything you want on the property. Olympic size swimming pool, pool service, shuffleboard, darts, volleyball, and clay tennis courts. So we lounged at the pool and had a beer. Met a guy, struck up a conversation, and he's from Uganda, and one thing leads to another, and business cards are exchanged, and you just never know....Great conversation, regardless.....As we were getting ready to leave, the 3-piece band starts up, and they're playing O Ye Como Va by Santana (2nd album - Abraxas), and the guy on guitar is pretty darn good. So I hang around a little, and next he starts playing jazz - Dave Brubeck's Take 5 - and the guitar player does the sax part, and I'm thinking "Wait, this is Rwanda, right? Where'd this guy come from?". So after the song, I ask him, and he lived in LA for 7 years with his brother, and learned to play guitar there, then came home two years ago and put together this band. And they were execellent. Nice treat.

Then we went for Indian food. And the entire wait staff -about20 or so tall African men trying to look like Arabs, with the fez and the pointy shoes and the sashes, and they treat one table to a unique rendition of Happy Birthday, done in four different languages, then it breaks into a Tanzanian song, inclusive of the phrase - I swear this on my mother's round steak & spaghetti dinner - Hakuna Matata. Dang, this culture is just amazing...