Psalm 28:7: "That'll be 40,000 a bounce."

So even though I just wrote a post this weekend definitely warrants a blog post. Last week sometime, we realized we only have three weekends left here in Rwanda: this past one (17-18), the coming one (24-25 = SAFARI!), one more (1-2), and then we leave the next Saturday the 8^th! Once we realized time was quickly ticking away, a few of us decided that we should travel for the weekend, since no one had all semester. So Andrea, Kat, Emmie, Kim and I made plans to go to Gisenyi for this past weekend! But first, let’s start with Friday…

Friday was the fifth annual tee-shirt competition. We all gathered in the living room after class and lunch, and Mitch and Kat explained the festivities: we would all head to Nyabugogo bus station and walk to the market nearby and had from then until dinner to buy used tee-shirts. They would later have to be modeled by us and entered into the following categories: most hilarious, most hideous, most bizzare, most politically charged, and closest to home. We all went searching through the market for tee-shirts that would fit the categories, and after dinner we had the fashion show. I bought an “I had a blast at Michael’s Bar Mitzvah June 16^th, 1990” shirt for most hilarious and then a Taco Bell shirt with the Chihuahua on the front for most hideous. Everyone bought some pretty awesome shirts, and it was a great time of laughs. My two favorites of the night were Lindsay’s Messiah College Oakes Museum shirt which won closest to home, and Kassi’s “This is what a COOL Grandpa looks like” shirt.

Back to travelling. Thanks to Kat, Emmie, and Andrea’s connections through their practicum site, they got details about guest houses, bus stops, and fees. So knowing as much as we could know, we headed off early Saturday morning with our backpacks, PB&J’s, and tortilla chips. We rode our mutatu (which insisted on stopping at every stop along the way and constantly losing the conductor guy) to Nyabugogo bus station and reached our first obstacle, finding a bus to Gisenyi. We started walking around and a second after I reminded Kim of the name of the town, a man came up to us asking “Gisenyi?” Shocked we all replied yes, and he brought us to his little booth where we bought our tickets to Gisenyi for 3,000 rwf (about 5 dollars) and then were led to the bus, which left within minutes. It was humorous how strangely perfectly it worked out, and we began our 3 hour drive to Gisenyi! Now, if you’ve never travelled with me, you don’t know that I’m a professional sleeper on road trips. This is only a bit complicated on mutatu rides where we’re whipping around corners, so I slept most of the whole way. I did wake up at a stop in Musanzi where Emmie pointed out to me the huge Volcano found there, which looked sweet in the midst of the fog. An hour later, when we were very close to reaching our destination, the bus stopped and we looked out the window to see shops with “Gisenyi” written on them. Uhhh… are we supposed to get off? we all pondered as we looked around. Thankfully the girls remembered that we’re supposed to get off at a bus station, so twenty minutes later when we pulled into one, we were glad to see we made the right decision. We thought it would be a good idea to buy our tickets in advance, but when Andrea went to talk to the woman, she only spoke French. Everyone looked at me and I stretched my French muscles to ask for the tickets. After a pretty solid conversation, we found that we were supposed to buy them the day we were leaving, and I felt pretty good about my French, unlike other conversations I’ve tried to have…

Here begins challenge number two: finding the guest house. We had reservations (made in French back home) to the Havana guest house, but we had no idea where it was. Over the next thirty minutes, we made the acquaintance of probably half the moto drivers in Gisenyi asking for directions to our guest house. My favorite was when one of them later passed us with a passenger, pointing his finger to indicate to us that we missed our turn. One attempted French phone call to the guest house and many confused conversations later, Kat spotted our guest house. YUS. It was actually really nice! It had a gate, which is always great, lots of TV’s, a really nice living room, and a super sweet woman running it. We put our stuff down, paid the 20,000 for the two rooms (split by 5 people=4,000 each=so cheap), and got directions (kindof) of how to get to the lake. We grabbed our swimsuits and headed to the beach!

We followed the “it’s just one road you follow it to the main road you take a turn you walk down that road you’re there” directions we got from a man at our guest house, and found our way to the beach. There’s something altogether wonderful about standing on a beach in Africa in the middle of November with some fabulous friends. After enjoying that feeling for a while, we decided to find the Lake Kivu Serena Hotel, which we were told would be a good place to go as you can pay to use their pool and private beach. As we walked there (passing a wedding on the way), the first sign that we were going to be out of place was the fact that they were checking the undersides of the cars with a camera. Ignoring that sign, we marched into the hotel, shocked at how fancy it was. As we paid to use their beach, we laughed and made bets about how much it costs a night for a single room. With our bets ranging from 40,000 – 100,000 a night, we came to find out that it was 175 USD a night, which is over 100,000 rwf a night. Walking away, we laughed about the fact that we were sleeping two and three in a bed to only have to pay 4,000 rwf a night, and then felt a bit out of place amidst rich mzungus. We got to the beach and plopped our stuff on chairs, and a man came to bring us cushions and take our receipt to get us towels. A few minutes later a woman came up to us asking if we knew we had to pay for the chairs and sitting on the beach and everything. Extremely confused, we thought she meant we had only paid for the swimming, not for using the beach (which wouldn’t be too much of a stretch considering you had to pay for pool and beach separately), so we awkwardly went to move our stuff. After a few more minutes of a confusing conversation, we realized she didn’t know we had already paid and figured we had walked in without knowing any better. With that settled, we made jokes the rest of the day about only paying to use the water or the sand, or how much each bounce on the kid’s trampoline was. After swimming in Lake Kivu, napping on the beach, taking hilarious pictures, and getting some great group shots, we left, beginning the next part of our journey entitled: “in pursuit of food.”

This was probably the hardest part of our journey. We stopped to have some soda’s and then took a very round-a-bout route to try to find food, staying along the main road. I did not think we’d have this much trouble finding food. We saw very few places, but those we did see were either not serving food yet, or a bit too sketchy for the 5 of us girls to feel comfortable in (although the new “Romantic Fast-Food Restaurant” was very close to winning- sadly it didn’t have enough food for all of us). After stopping at a grocery store to pick up 3 loaves of bread for less than a dollar each for our breakfast and getting startled by the call to prayer, we ended up heading to a fancy hotel we saw on the way to our guest house. It was close to our guest house and probably wouldn’t be too sketchy, and once we got there we found they had a super cheap buffet. Yes. After we ate our fill in a sweet outdoor seating area, we were leaving when we heard “We have a night club, come see.” Shrugging our shoulders, we followed the waiter there, only to find a really cool colorfully lit up and completely empty night club. Laughing, we headed back home and snuggled watching TV. While all the rooms had TV’s, we found out that the TV in the living room controlled what the room TV’s watched, so we started on music videos, moved to French news, and then eventually back to music videos. We got a real kick out of the fact that even the volume was being controlled, and we very vocal about our feelings from when music videos turned to French news. We then headed to bed, Emmie, Andrea, and I cozily sharing one double bed (I had the middle- Here’s a conversation Emmie and I had about it: “I couldn’t roll over because your face was right there so close to mine!” Well I came back from the bathroom and both your faces were facing in and I had to lie on my back! “Yeah, that’s when I finally got to roll over!”), and Kim and Kat sharing the other.

We woke up in the morning, ate our loaves of bread, and headed out. We went to see the craft co-op store down the street, and after looking around for a while, found 4 really nice padded duffle bags. We asked the man how much they were and he said 5,000, but we got him to offer 4,000 since we wanted to buy all four. Such a good deal, especially since I got my first purse for that much and it’s nowhere near as nice, and we’ve seen people selling virtually the same thing for 10,000. With our bags in hand, we headed back to the bus station, bought our 12 o clock tickets, had some lunch, and jumped on our bus. We then began the three hour journey home, with bread and sambossa snacks on the way. Yum.

So yup, that was our weekend. It was really great to get out of the house and feel independent, and also to see a new part of Rwanda. Attached are some pictures, the first one is thanks to Emmie and the last three are thanks to Andrea.