It is saturday and Beatrice and I want to go to the Expo, so we leave before lunch. As we pass a house of one of her friends, Beatrice decides to stop for a visit. The young daughter opens and we wait in the living room with the other daughter, watching TV, while the friend is taking her bath. I don’t really understand why we insist on waiting. It is not really the appropriate moment for a visit. Still, we stay and I partly follow the soap. It is just Beatrice who doesn’t watch these soaps. Everyone else does. And now, since Emmanuel is back, our TV doesn’t show only news anymore either. When the friend has finished, she joins us in the living room and they have a short conversation, before we continue our way.
As we wait at the bus stop, Richard drives past us. He takes us with him for a short distance. He is wearing sports clothes and his dad is with him. They are going somewhere else, so they drop us at another bus station from where we take a car to the part of Kigali, where the Expo ground is. However, arriving at the station there, we still have a long walk before we arrive at the ground itself. A steady stream of people is going the same way. Before entering the grounds, we are searched and our bags are checked, but the queues are not long yet. Banners everywhere. There are banks and other big companies whose names I recognise from driving through Kigali. Some stalls are still empty, the big screens which will later probably show advertisements are guarded by security personnel. This is a big trade fair. It gets more interesting when we reach the area where handicraft is displayed. There are many Kenyan vendors. One woman wants to sell us leather sandals with colourful beads and she describes how she makes them. Soon we realise, that almost every stall has these shoes and I doubt it is really her that makes them. They look nice, though, but I don’t buy any. In some stalls, the functionality of cutting utensils or special sweepers is demonstrated. I prefer those selling cloth and jewellery, but not the Pakistani ones. Apart from the way they talk and how they negotiate the price, why should I buy Pakistani cloth when I am in Rwanda? There is a lot of jewellery stalls, but some sell Rwandan sugar, honey, maize flour and coffee and there are huge piles of plastic toys, probably from China. It is getting more and more crowded and I get more and more uncomfortable. I don’t even feel like taking pictures. And I don’t feel like buying anything. It is more expensive here anyway. In the end, I buy earrings and a small Rwandan container and Beatrice gets honey, shoes and cloth. Just at the end we find the area with the Rwandan stalls. These are the ones I am interested in, but we are getting too hungry. Making our way back to the entrance is difficult as the stream of arriving people is dense now. I am glad we came, but this Expo is not the right surrounding for me to buy my souvenirs. It is too much.
With motorbikes we go back to the area of Kigali that I know. On our way, suddenly my driver overtakes Beatrice and we loose them. They don’t follow us and I start to worry when my driver takes a shortcut to another road and I can see Beatrice again. We stop at a restaurant to have lunch. It is the same restaurant we came to one my first Sunday with Alexis. This time, we are not ordering goat meat but the vegetarian plate which is chips, rice and peas and three bits of meat in a red sauce. As usual, football is shown on TV. It is the final of the peace cup, but the team of the Rwandan army is not among them. They are on fourth place.
