the travel buddy

I often find travel buddies with similar temperaments and backgrounds to mine. But one day, I found myself traveling with a Chinese lady for a day - in Accra.

I don't take so many pictures these days. I don't know if that's me or just having traveled a lot. But she took many. We kept stopping so that she could. Even in places where photography was prohibited.

I think what surprised me the most was the kinds of questions she asked. At the Kwame Nkrumah memorial museum, she was surprised to learn that he was married to an Egyptian. Really? They allowed that? Yes, he was very Pan-African. In China, you can't work for government if you are married to a foreigner. You would have to resign.

We went to a crafts market where there were several nativity scene sets. What is this? she'd asked. It's the nativity scene. What nativity? Baby Jesus in the manger with his parents and the three kings. Ohh....

Africans are very tactile compared to Asians. At the market, they would keep reaching for her, which kept flustering her, stop touching me, she'd say...

I was otherwise unaware of all these things until I met her...

getting married

marriage and weddings but weddings mostly are a reckoning. a reckoning of relationships with his family, with your family, with him... maybe even with yourself...

in a social gathering many couples agreed that they wouldn't have a wedding again. why? it's childish! they mused. is it?

the wedding is theirs, the marriage is yours, i kept hearing as the wedding planning began. and it was true. or at least partly. the marriage could be theirs as well. we'll have to see...

how much do you assert yourself with a new family? how much does it portend for the future?

would i do it again? have a big wedding? not likely. could i have done it any differently? i don't think i could've.

like the end of bad relationships, i feel like i went through a war. where everything comes to a head. a meeting of cultures and personalities and traditions but mostly personalities. and by the end of it i was exhausted and broke and disappointed and a little less innocent or childlike or dreamy.

another induction into adulthood.

winter in warsaw

i have never fathomed traveling to poland and yet here i am in poland. in one of those intensive workshops that give you no opportunity to see anything about the place other than the hotel room.

so i'm not so disappointed.

i did try to be a little bit of a tourist though and attempted to book an evening city tour. they had many options: the jewish tour, the communist tour... in lovely classic Nysa 522s but they were only available on weekends and i was traveling back then.

and so i compensated by over-eating everything that was particularly polish and by "engaging" with local poles by messaging with my tinder swipes... or not. of course i didn't understand i thing they were saying in polish!

i thought of my one pole friend - who hasn't lived in poland for awhile - so i didn't try to call her.

it felt like russia to be honest.

it's the first time i ever really thought about eastern europe, about what life might have been like during communism. about the fickleness of nationalities. one of the conference girls i ended up spending a lot of time with, hates the question "where are you from?" she tells me her grandmother's nationality changed three or four times in her lifetime and yet she never moved.

when her grandmother was a little girl, it was called the austro-hungarian empire, and then czechoslovakia after world war 1 and then slovakia in '93. it was called the slovak republic under nazi germany and czechoslovakia under soviet rule and each time they were forbidden from speaking certain languages.

and so she doesn't feel much for nationality in much the same way her grandmother doesn't.

and i found this amusing, being a nomad who never grew roots too deep to find that even when you do, your surroundings can change so much and so frequently they render you the nomad.

being in san francisco

so america keeps trying to convince me that its food is real. real beef! the ads say, real milk!... which makes me wonder, what this food otherwise is?!

"grass fed beef" says one menu. "farm-grown potatoes" boasts a crisps packet. do cows not otherwise eat grass? are potatoes not otherwise grown on farms?

but i like san francisco so far. i like the visual treat of both the new and old. it IS beautiful and people are friendly. and i like the paper toilet seat covers and use them every time.

i know that i could be doing a lot of touristy things. but instead i've been enjoying spending time with migrant locals. living through their years of immigrant experiences vicariously through summarised reflections of what moving to america has meant for them, watching san francisco evolve and gentrify.

the american dream both is and isn't. it IS amazing that you can be whatever it is that you want to be, especially in a place as culturally diverse as san francisco. but if you don't achieve your dream, then it really isn't worth it living in the states - i don't think. you end up in a vicious cycle of making ends meet, staying stuck. too stuck to leave. and too stuck to enjoy staying. but for those who make it, i can understand why they would never want to leave.

coming to san francisco

the last time (and first time) i was in san francisco, i was 15, it was the end of a millennium and there were grand speculations about how the world was going to end.

i went with family and stayed with family and don't remember much besides eating and shopping.

the woman next to me on the plane told me that it was beautiful but i don't think i had much of a concept of the beauty of cities then and so i just took her word for it.

16 years later, i'm here again, this time for work and i appreciate it much more both as someone who has traveled and as someone who has grown roots. i care about the history and character of a city and it's exciting to be in a place that has changed exponentially.

in the late 90s, my cousin had gotten into the gaming industry straight out of high school. little did anyone know that that was to define the city and that the city was to define the world of technology.

everyone here works in tech, my friend says, at dinner as she explains who around the table works where. and true enough, everyone either has a start up or is innovating, or is working for a tech firm in some way or form... except laura from new york who makes a living suing people for some magnetic device she "invented".

we go out to a club after dinner and everyone is super friendly and quite polite and i wonder if this is typically san franciscan. everyone here goes to burning man, my friend explains, which is a week long party in the desert.

during the day we had gone window shopping and site seeing and she had told me all about the kinds of things san franciscans like, which is just about everything. there are themed parties for themed parties' sake. there is innovation for innovation's sake. but there are more non san franciscans in san francisco than san franciscans because people leave. the streets are becoming gentrified. and there is so much money people don't know what to do with, they get high and don't commit.

i do notice that people in the club range from 30 - 50.

it's never-ever land. we don't grow up.

it is fun in the club and the light shows are mesmerising and the people around me seem to be in good spirits not necessary because they're high (although i did learn later that there was a lot of coke going round) but simply because they want to have fun and fun seems to be a necessary part of living in san francisco.

but amidst all this fun which i'm happy to have for the time that i'm here, i think that i wouldn't want to stay in never-ever land. and that there is something sad about not evolving.

Baringo

We're going to the former president's home, a place touched by his priority for education, evidenced by the schools on every bend but equally silenced by his intolerance for dissent. So much so that the only civil society that existed there for awhile was environmental. So much so that it was only when he left power that his people finally admitted that they were hungry.

I don't know how much of it is my own feeling or whether there really is a sense of loss in Kabarnet for the days when their man was in power. Every election cycle is fraught with the question of alliances and front-runners and in a country divided by ethno-political power and memory, the question I feel on their lips or anyone's lips who has not yet tasted power is whether and when it will be their time (again).

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We arrive in Kabarnet, five hours after leaving Nairobi and in the evening when we take dinner I notice the homogeneity of colour and laugh at the irony of what is black in Nairobi being brown in the Rift Valley.

Trips to UG

The last time I landed in Entebbe, they herded us like goats into lines to submit forms declaring that we did not have ebola. 

"This is very serious!" they cautioned us, as if to justify how much more inefficient their immigration services had become as a result of the crisis.

And then they sprayed us with hand sanitiser and let us go. 

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Uganda always reminds me of Rwanda: the hills upon which the cities are built, the militarised state...

"What do you think about when you think of Uganda?" my colleague asked me. 

"Idi Amin."

He laughed, "but that was so long ago!"

"And greenness and bananas." I compensated. 

"We are a democracy now."

"What is the ratio between the ruling party and the opposition?"

"About 70:30?"

"Wow, that's a big difference."

"Yeah but the Vice-President is running this time. I think he has a good chance of winning."

"Is he really independent?"

"Well, come to think of it, he hasn't officially denounced the party."

"Do you think maybe he could just be alternating like Putin and Medvedev?"

"Maybe. I wouldn't put it past them."