First Impressions of Nairobi

Hi Folks,
I arrived late last night (local time) in Nairobi. After an hour wait in the immigration line and a harrowing taxi ride from the airport I finally settled into my hotel around 11 pm and crashed. Our cabbie was doing ~120 km/hr (which roughly translates to about 70 miles/hr), swerving in and out of traffic and pedestrians, and ran three red lights. But as Seinfeld quipped about NY cabs - you never feel danger in the back of a cab, your only thought is "boy I sure wouldn't do that in my car."

Lynn and I had our first meeting of the trip at the Kenyan Meteorological Department's headquarters about 8 km outside of the city center. Their office is located in a sprawling compound in which they've also built apartments for the forecasters and their families. While their technology was mostly outdated (running Windows 95 on insanely slow computers) they were still pumping out an impressive array of forecast products with limited resources. How in the hell they're managing to run a 14 km nested grid version of WRF with a 30 x 30 degree domain on those computers I will never know. All in all their work-flow wasn't that dissimilar from the NWS in the states.

Nairobi is clearly a city in flux. There is construction everywhere and you get the sense that they are intensely focused on modernizing. Ironically most of the road construction that we've seen was being done with Chinese machines. Apparently China wants the natural resources of Africa so much that they're willing to invest to improve the infrastructure to make exports possible. Most of the other people at my hotel are Chinese or Indian businessmen. Below is a picture I snapped out of my hotel window looking at a new high-rise going up. My guess is that they don't have OSHA in Kenya because these workers were hanging off the side of the building wearing flip-flops or barefoot with no safety gear whatsoever.


It's cliche in textbooks to talk about developing nations as demanding their right to build and advance without having to invest in the same technologies as developed countries - sort of a quantity over quality approach. I've never really given this much thought until observing Nairobi. There is road construction everywhere and more cars than you can imagine. With no emission laws the old model cars are really polluting the air, which leads to a very smoggy air. There are high-rises next to dilapidated buildings and people seem to have cell phones but not necessarily good shoes. Developing right now, regardless of the lack of direction or laws to control growth, seems to be a high priority.

Overall the hotel is fairly nice and very clean. Here's a picture of my workspace complete with an afternoon cup of tea. The internet is slow but the connection is steady. The food so far has been interesting but edible. Sometimes I think it may be best not to question what you're eating when in a foreign country. Because the dollar trades to the Kenyan schilling so highly (I traded $200 US for 17,000 Ksh at the airport) doing the math as to what things costs is difficult. Tomorrow (Saturday) is a workday for Lynn and I as we have to submit yet another report before the workshop at the end of our trip. I can think of worse places to spend a day writing. On Sunday we fly out of Nairobi and continue our journey in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.


I'll leave you with one more shot out of my window, this time overlooking more of downtown. There's a large park in the distance which is apparently their equivalent of Central Park, perhaps I'll venture there tomorrow. Hopefully I can snap a picture of some of the insane (~45 minutes to go 5 miles this morning) traffic before I leave. The excitement continues!

Best,
Casey