Today marks the sixth month anniversary of our arrival in Kenya and to celebrate we thought we would do a quick comparison of things we like and don’t like here and at home. It goes without saying that we miss family and friends but other than that there are some things which surprised us:
The things we love about Kenya
1. Never knowing what the day will bring - seeing a camel walk down our street or monkeys in the trees near our house, rainstorms so violent you think your house might wash away
2. The taste of the fruits
3. Finding out what Kenyans know and like about the UK; the Premier League obviously, Top Gear (strangely), the Royal family
4. Colours – it’s like a different spectrum
5. Having ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ holidays every month – Kenya is a stunning country
6. Having a sense of perspective; the relative ease and privilege of British life, the sense that there is more to life than work, but also of geography. We can’t believe how many people we haven’t visited on account of how far away they live in the UK. The island is tiny!
7. Giraffes, warthogs, elephants and hippos-our favourites of all the amazing wildlife we have seen so far
8. DVD Derek and his latest pre-release titles
The things we don’t like and won’t miss about Kenya
1. Food, especially ugali. The carb based diet, augmented with chewy meat, is not the greatest
2. Traffic - the chaos of the matatus and the amount of time you can be sat in queues breathing in the foul black air
3. Dust - the feeling that you are never truly clean in Nairobi
4. Prayer - having to adhere to it in meetings, having to listen to the call to prayer, having to nod in agreement about the merits of organized religion
5. Bugs and flies
6. Shouts of ‘mzungo, mzungo' in the street, for no apparent reason other than to remind you that you are white and not black it seems
7. Being overcharged for all sorts of things because you are a mzungo and in particular being told ‘what you have to understand about xxxx in Kenya is that it is very, very expensive…..'
8. Kenyan politics-much more about personality than ideology but you get the feeling that they are all screwing the country over
9. Attitudes to women and homosexuals
10. Plugs which hiss at you, showers which ‘make you dance’ and the general quality of electrical fittings
11. The absolute disregard for customer service
The things we miss about the UK
1. Proper cups of tea made without boiling a vat of full fat milk
2. Cakes that have sugar in them
3. Dressing gowns-mornings are quite nippy now in Nairobi
4. Being able to walk around freely after dark
5. Good roads
6. Nice bathrooms including a bath
7. The NHS and public services- truly what sets Britain apart from the rest of the world
8. Cheese
9. 5-a-side football and the Championship
10. Clean fingernails
11. Bus timetables
12. Queues
13. Sandwiches
14. Being paid each month
The things we don’t miss about the UK
1. The weather
2. Incessant complaining about how hard life is in one of the richest countries in the world
3. Having a TV
4. Celebrity obsessed culture
5. Health and safety culture- if there is a river at the bottom of your playground just teach children not to play near it.
6. Waiting for transport-you may have to queue once you are in it but you never wait long for transport in Nairobi
7. Watery tomatoes
8. Pessimism
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