Reasons Why I Love Kenya One: Tusker Rocks.

When planning for Egypt I was looking for a back-up plan in case Egypt didn’t work out due to various reasons. A conspiracy of invading Kenya for a week was revealed and the timing would fit just perfectly. I then enthusiastically initiated a half-self-invitation (half because me thinks the plan was “randomly” revealed to me for a reason) and one of the original organizers, a dirty old Turk, generously accepted it (gasp!) and indicated that he wouldn’t mind me since my job was to look pretty and bring him juice boxes. It wasn’t so hard to fool him even though he knew for a fact that I wasn’t good at either. Note to self from this part of the story is keep your self-esteem severely low, if still any left, when you travel and good things will happen.

So wandering down a street in Cairo I walked in a travel agency and bought the cheapest flight tickets. Next thing was to convince Pilli that arriving in Nairobi at 4am and having 10 hours to kill alone before she came in wouldn’t be that bad of an idea. It failed. Of course, what was I thinking, Pilli is the most superb host ever. I luckily ran into a lady at Nairobi airport who was waiting for her friend to pick her up and offered to give me a ride and drop me off in downtown. I loved this country already. When I had gotten to know most of the hotel staff and was just about to exchange meaningful life stories with them during the 4 hours in Hilton Nairobi, Pilli’s brother collected me from the lobby. All good times have to come to an end but the end of one is just the beginning of the next. The moment I showed up at the door as a totally random foreigner that they had never met before and was greeted warm-heartedly by Pilli’s whole family I knew that was bound to be a great time.

And it was, absolutely.

To be specially pointed out is that Tusker is THE beer in Kenya and it rocks. (It’s obvious that I need to prove that this entry is valid for this blog and that my personal travels do matter for a good reason.) It will apparently go extremely well with Nyama Choma too but I didn’t get to try the combination. Can’t complain though because at least I had the delicious Nyama Choma and didn’t miss out on the experience. Al is going to keep calling me “fucking culturalist” for this one even though I still don’t know what that means. I mean of course you get attention talking about culture shit and I like attention; and actually if you could do deep and thoughtful about cultures you probably get respect too instead of just attention but I guess I’ll live with what I deserve. I still prefer hunting wild animals and tossing baby zebras on BBQ with other Asian tourists on the grassland while lions are ripping up and devouring buffaloes to answering why Chinese eat dogs; and I still don’t bother to pretend I’m a better person because I don’t eat animals (most of the time) and I’ll keep ordering pig ears, salty snails and chicken feet for foreigners for their “cultural experiences”.

Thanks for the great time, to everyone we met on the road, to all the old and new friends, to Tusker beer, and to the breathtaking African motherland. Till we meet again.