Sunday 12 August 2012

Sketchy!-August 11th, 2012

Today was a pretty lazy day. We all got to sleep in and I woke up around 10:30 am. We all relaxed watching the same episodes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians that we have been since I got here. Not my choice to watch, but not much to choose from when you only have 5 channels. After we all ate some lunch we decided that we wanted to go to this place called Old Town, which is where you can see some old buildings and there are many shops there that you can get souveniers for pretty cheap. So we called Bernard (our personal driver) to come pick us up. It was about 12:45 pm when we left the compound and we proceeded on the drive. When we got closer to Old Town we started to all get sketched out because we looked out the windows and all we saw were tons and tons of people swarming around, beaten down streets, tight squeezes to walk through etc. We did not feel that being dropped off here would be very safe. We kept driving and came to the sign that says Old Town, once we were there it seemed a lot nicer than what we had been seeing and also Bernard told us he would wait there for us so we could leave whenever we wanted. This made me feel a lot better. When we all got out of the car it started raining, but when it rains here it doesn't last very long.

We started to walk and we had several people approach us and wanted to give us tours, for a price of course. We nicely declined their offer and again started walking and then a man came to us and started talking and he told us he was a security officer for Old Town and we started following him. He took us and showed us some places around. We all started thinking, we are proabably going to have to pay for this even though we didnt want a tour. We just kept getting deeper and deeper into the sketchy parts where we didnt want to be. We kept telling the man we wanted to go back and finally after about the third time we told him he took us back to where we started. He then demanded to have money and we all told him we didnt want and tour and werent going to pay him and he said that it was a good price etc. So we all gave him 100 shillings (little over a dollar) and sent him on his way. We then were able to go into the affordable and more cheap shops that we were looking for in the first place. We spent a couple hours there and decided we wanted to head back home. While on our little journey we had been stared at a lot, whistled at, talked to, and many of the men would say sexual things to us. Let's just say I had my guard up because we definately are not used to that since in the U.S. guys don't do that. We made it back to Bernard and made our way home. I was pretty happy with all the stuff I got and am excited to give them to my friends and family back home so they can enjoy a little piece of Africa. The rest of the night was relaxing and we all crowded in the living to watch Anchorman off of one of the girl's laptops.

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