Gentlemen in Nairobi
It’s a lovely space. Just a lot of time in a lovely space. The same lovely space.
I never made it through Amor Towels’s A Gentleman in Moscow, but I have seen a few movies and Disney programs about families who live in hotels. I did not imagine we would be one of them.
Theresa and Ava left yesterday for Jordan at 1 am (and are currently stranded in the Istanbul airport), leaving Paul and me to fend for ourselves in Nairobi until our test results come in tomorrow night (testing at 9 am). We’ve already been here for a week, and our bizarre circumstances (and probably personalities) have made this an oddly cozy home base.
Ava coined the term “awkwardly nice” to describe it, and that’s pretty spot on.
I’ve been working pretty hard on Swahili, not out of any expectation that I would really learn to speak it, but just because it’s fun to see the surprise in people’s eyes when I ask how they are, say good morning, or respond to a question not in English. This has clearly been the object of some conversation among the staff because I am now being taught several words a day by different people and my pronunciation is being aggressively corrected.
The staff all know and use our names. Stephen, our room captain for most of our time here, has taken a particular liking to Paul, also working to teach him Swahili. When he came to tidy up the other day, I was upstairs, and he opened another room for Paul so he could continue to work on his school (or watch YouTube as the case may be). Richard, the regular gym/pool attendant teases me about my figure, and clearly looked up Kentucky when he got home one night because he asked me about my bourbon preferences. The head chef told us his name is VJ and recommended several outdoor places nearby we should eat.
Louis, Walter, and Anna work both the rooftop restaurant and outdoor patio where we have breakfast, and every day at least one of them has a new phrase for me (today’s was “coffee with milk, please.” Yesterday was “excuse me,” sparked by my almost bowling over one of the waitresses crossing over a doorway. The Masai tribespeople on staff always comment on my height (and are generally the tallest people around), and we’ve developed a banter around it.
Paul might be living his best life.
The guards (and there are lots of guards) are a little flabbergasted that we walk around outside, shop for groceries in the local markets, and call our own Uber and Uber Eats. But they’ve come to accept it.
I’m reluctant to take pictures of any of it because I don’t want them to feel like any of it is inauthentic on my part, which probably doesn’t make any sense, but is still how I feel.
Out one of our windows is a set of apartment complexes where we get an oddly intimate view of people’s normal lives. Laundry is hanging in the courtyard, water is carried upstairs (I guess not all of the units have running water), older folks bring out chairs and hang out in the shade, and kids play soccer after school.
Out the other window is one of the million buildings under construction in Nairobi, which is clearly booming.
Today, Paul and I walked to the market for snacks and ended up having lunch at Subway (I’m over any idea that we need to be “authentic” or “local” in our eating). I really do like the energy of this city. But we both swore when we got home we would continue to be grateful for unbroken sidewalks, the relative lack of people with machine guns, and less apparent need for metal detectors at the entrance to every public space.
I really have enjoyed this space, and I will be very ready to leave. Fingers crossed for our tests tomorrow.
