Musings of an immigrant:

I couldn’t get a Sprite either in 1.5 or 2 litres. One of my favorite exotic flavor juices Red Guava was also not available. Did they have it in stock? They had never heard of Red Guava and had never stocked it but we have Passion, Orange, Pineapple, Red Berry and other variants of these in mixed flavors was the helpful response. What of curry peas, my favorite finger snack? Did they have that in stock…..ever? What is that I was asked but we have “njugu karanga” I was told. The office needed a foot scrapper and door mats where could these be found as they were not in stock? Blank stares met me obviously communicating that they had no idea what the hell I was talking about!!

This was a rude awakening since these are things that I have always taken for granted while shopping in Nairobi but which in Nyeri seem to be exotic, alien products probably since the suppliers do not wish to have dead stock on the shelves so choose to supply only their most popular flavors guaranteed to fly off the shelves. But don’t get me wrong! These products may be available somewhere around but I have not found them yet. The reality of small town Kenya is now sinking in and it involves decisions such as where to eat, where to get a haircut and a carwash or even a decent pub.

Nairobi spoils one for choice given that there a myriad of options to choose from on one street alone. In Nyeri a barber's shop is bound to be one of those River Road look alike places where we were taken by my father back in the day for a crew cut by Kinyanjui in a setting comprising those old comfortable barber chairs with poorly drawn characters on the wall depicting the various haircut and beard shave styles or a place squeezed in between an MPesa outlet and a restaurant almost as if it were an afterthought by the landlord where a poorly designed barber’s chair is located in an environment where three people present threatens to cause a riot all for the princely sum of 50 bob for a beard shave! 50 bob, I muse, so what gives those chaps in Nairobi the temerity to charge 200 bob for a simple shave?

But then again what standards of hygiene can be observed at 50 bob? Do they really thoroughly clean those hot towels or do they just rinse them off after the last customer and then reuse it on you when it is your turn? And that aftershave in a plastic bottle has to be the cheapest and smelliest on the market!

But again, the fact of the matter is that each town, market, village, county in Kenya etc has its own style of doing things and relating it to somewhere else is doing it a great disservice. So I will just take it one day at a time as I explore the possibilities that are there in Nyeri and consume what is available leaving my options open.