Caught a cab at 8:15 AM. Met a contact, who assured me he could put me in touch with somebody in the next few hours: the guy I wanted to talk to was supposed to be at a public hearing this morning and we would meet him there. So I sit next to my contact in the windowless subterranean offices where the hearing is held. My eyes repeatedly roll back into my skull. Then breaktime, which brings sunshine, coffee, and roll. A simple African cinnamon roll, not the syrup dripping, frosting moneyshotted $5 Cinnabon of home.

Out in the sunshine, I stand around while my contact plays six degrees of seperation (“This man in the red jacket, he knows the man’s wife. I will talk to him. Wait here.”)

I'm just thankful to be out of the hearing, soaking in the sun, caffeine in my veins. We’d just come out of the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Nairobi’s trademark sprawl of bizarrchitecture. A big cylinder rising here, an enormous cone dropped there (photo). And there are ramps everywhere, with concrete-bottomed moats below them. Moat bottoms are painted light blue, to give the sense that the courtyard is littered with kiddie pools. It looks like they just kept building random add-ons until the budget ran out. The place is like Nairobi and its people itself: confoundingly arbitrary.

It makes a bit of sense: Nairobi only exists because the Brits set up a railroad camp here that kept sprawling. Arbitrary! Take the TV programming. Yes, much of it is derivative of western shows, arbitrary on the face of it. But the western TV shows here aren’t CSI or Friends, they’re The Andy Dick Show and short-lived Dan Ackroyd-as-minister sitcom Soul Man. This is where crap TV goes to live on in zombietude: arbitrary squared.

Ask about strange things that people do, and you will be told, We have a saying! In books and cab rides, “The man who chokes who should speak up!” or “When the old lady disappears, the jackal craps gray hairs.” Yes, but those are sayings. Using a saying from a bygone rural culture to justify your actions as a cab driver is, is...

"Arbitrary?" Yes, that's it.

to be continued tomorrow.