It’s funny how things happen: one day, you’re sleeping happily in your nice cosy double bed in the house you spent 18 years in and then the next you find yourself a world away from it all in the hustle and bustle of a city you don’t know. Or something like that…
Actually, the city was very quiet when I got my taxi in to my hostel and even the area around it was too. But that was a sunday afternoon and it seems that, the world over, people love to spend their sunday afternoons loafing around.
All the other days, the city is a hive of activity, like any other: people shouting, cars driving all over the place (think Sri Lanka, but worse), motorcyles on the pavements, pedestrians in the road and generally lots of noise.
Then there’s the hospital… the neonatal ward seems to have modelled itself around the traffic situation. Mother’s coming in every 3 hours for a feed, medical students trouping in in their 10s, a sprinkling of doctors and nurses trying to organise the chaos, and most fondly… the incubator rooms… as if, it wasn’t hot enough normally!
After all this, there’s the lazy afternoon’s and evenings spent sipping water/beers, playing cards or trying to sleep through the mayhem: yesterday evening being a prime example. Having had a very tiring sunday in the sea off a lovely island, I came back to a hostel to find a ‘kitchen party’ in full sway. Apparently, this is the pre-wedding celebration whereby the bride gets her kitchen stocked up for her by all her guests. Much like any other party, the music carries on into the evening, funny though, because for all the noise, I slept like a baby… well, the kind of baby that doesn’t wake up every 3 hours wanting to be fed… hmm.. I wonder what kind of baby that is???
Anyway, enough is enough… until next time.
Kwa heri.
