A Night Out In Kampala

Because my friend can not speak any Luganda I decided to escort him back to Kampala where he would catch his bus to Nairobi. We went a day early so that I could see what local Kampala night life was all about. We stayed in a Hostel filled with only locals directly next to the taxi park. Lets just say this is not the “nice” area of town. On the top floor of the hostel was a bar filled with all locals. We spent the night talking to people in the bar and sitting on the balcony watching the traffic going in and out of the taxi park.

First, I should comment on the taxi park. The taxi park consists of three different levels. The ground level or the area where the taxis drive has two groups of people the taxi drivers and their conductors avidly searching and grabbing people to take in their taxis and vendors walking around selling things to people in the taxis. The first group is quite aggressive and can be very pushy. There was a huge fight over whose taxi my friend and I were going to go in when we left Kampala the first time. I got really scared because I didn’t know what was going on, but apparently what happened was one guy was trying to lead us to his taxi and another taxi driver poached us. The second group, the vendors sell everything from a complete dinner that they have on plates stacked on top of each other on their heads to watches to ice cream to soda to newspapers to skewers of freshly grilled goat meat. Needless to say it’s quite interesting just to sit in a taxi and watch all these vendors go by.

Directly surrounding the area where the taxi park is a market selling everything you can think of. Littering this ridiculously busy market are male pedicurists who you have to be careful not to bump into. In addition, make shift restaurants litter this area selling everything from a cheap bowl of Kotogo (matooke in some sort of broth of beans, chicken, tomatoes, or ground nuts) to chapattis (a tortilla like bread). This was by far the coolest and most interesting place to grab a meal in the middle of my night at the local bar.

On the street directly across from the taxi park are shops selling goods from china. These shops are owned by someone rich who rents out the room to a vendor. The landlord sets the rent so high that ten or so vendors have to squeeze into a shop and share the rent. That means each small shop is divided into three or four different shops selling completely unrelated items. These people then rent out the side walk space outside of the store to street vendors who practically cover the pavement with their goods. These vendors then promise to save their space for a friend for a small fee. Basically it is one person renting from another over and over again.
So the Bar itself was called the Park Side and had balconies over looking this chaotic mess of a market/taxi park. Inside the bar was a wide variety of people. Most seemed to somewhat well off by Ugandan standards. For most people here a beer is a huge luxury. The first interesting thing happened when I asked for a cup of coffee. The bar tender looked at me confused and then held up little plastic bags of coffee flavored liquor. Eww!! After a little investigation I realized that all the hard liquor they sold came in little bags about the size of a Kens Salad Dressing. You can get everything from a Beckham Gin or a B-52 Vodka. After having my fair share of cheap alcohol on my term abroad in Vietnam I stuck to the beers. In addition to ingesting alcohol I meet several people around the bar. They were all very nice and wanted to buy us beers, alcohol, and whatever else we wanted. I never know how to react to such hospitality. In America and some western European countries when someone offers you something it is not always the polite thing to accept. For example, in America it is considered a little rude to take the last piece of cake without offering it to every one else first, and if someone offers to buy you a beer in a bar you better buy the next round. However, here people keep buying things for me and won’t let me buy the next round so to speak. So I can’t tell if it would be rude to buy the next round or I should be. Either way I meet some really cool people.

I met one man who was a civil engineer. He got his degree in India. He is currently working on a building for USAID. His brother has a BA in electrical engineering and has moved to America. His brother has moved to America because the American dollar goes so much further in Uganda that he plans to work really hard and save about 40,000 dollars and then move back to Uganda and retire. The problem, however, is that he does not have a green card. He wouldn’t be able get an electrical engineering job with a BA from Uganda anyways. So instead he works as a bouncer and a window washer. He makes 700 to 800 dollars a week and of that is able to save about 100 to 200 dollars. Now I’m not sure how much of this story is true. It was hard to tell b/c while the man I met had a good idea of how much things cost in America he was drunk and it all seemed sort of unbelievable. In addition, he was with a woman who was supposedly his wife. But, she was very quite and removed from the conversation. Now this could be Ugandan culture and this is very probable considering how patriarchal Ugandan society is, but the guide books said that this area of town had a lot of prostitutes in the bars and I am still wondering if she was a prostitute and he made the whole story up.