March 14th-17th, 2019

Allan, Robin and I took a long weekend trip to Kigali, Rwanda. Robin has a friend who works at MASS Design in Kigali, so we decided it would be a fun trip to visit the architecture firm and explore Rwanda.

We arrived on Thursday evening and were immediately impressed by the cleanliness and organization of Kigali. The city itself is situated on many green hills. We didn’t feel like we were in Africa while visiting, as everything is very westernized.

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Thursday night we went to a jazz bar right by our hostel, tried local beer and listened to live music. They even had small craft beer scene in Rwanda, which is very different than Uganda and other neighboring countries.

On Friday, we visited MASS Design. We went for an office tour, it made me miss being an architect; fun models and samples lining the walls. We then grabbed lunch with Erin (Robin’s friend) and Adam. We continued discussing construction and architecture challenges in Africa. MASS is working on some really awesome projects and their work is quite lovely.

After lunch, we took moto’s to the Genocide Memorial. We spent around an hour and a half there. It was a very impactful memorial. It explained the history of the genocide, origins of how it started, the severity of it and how little the outside world did to help end it.

After the museum, we headed back towards our hostel and grabbed a drink before getting ready for a roof top happy hour at MASS. We mingled for the evening as the sun set. Their office is right beside the convention center (pictured below). Apparently during its construction, it passed through 3 different contractors. They must have had some major difficulties with the construction. After happy hour, we went with Adam to get Indian food before calling it a night.

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Saturday morning, Adam picked us up down the street from our hostel at a local smoothie joint. We jumped in his car and headed to his job site, a new district hospital. We went on a nice long site walk with the contractors. The contractors are Chinese, this is very common in East Africa. The Chinese are paying a lot of attention to this area and helping to develop it. The tour was very informative. The jobsite differed from our construction site mainly based on scale, but there were a lot of commonalities. It was a wonderful tour.

After the tour, we went to the downtown area for lunch. We went to La Gallete which is a French bakery/butcher shop. The meat was wonderful! We then walked around the downtown, stopping in various shops. We wound our way around to a hotel with a pool, where we intended to spend the afternoon relaxing and having cocktails. The hotel we went to was the Hotel des Mille Collines. This is the “Hotel Rwanda” hotel.. which I didn’t realize until after we left!

At the hotel, we met a friend of our friend Joe, Desire, she’s doing a public health rotation in Kigali. We had a drink with her and then joined her, her cousin and her cousin’s boyfriend at a tapas restaurant. We enjoyed tapas and nice conversation for the evening. After dinner we headed back to the hostel. I was exhausted and passed out when the boys went out and partied. We headed back to Uganda early Sunday morning.

Kigali is very clean, there isn’t any garbage on the roads! They’re clearly following and maintaining a city plan. They also allow only 1 person on the back of their motos and provide helmets for passengers. (In Uganda, we’ve seen 4 or 5 people stacked on bodas, no helmets and often times they’re carrying random objects as well. One of our favorite boda experiences was seeing a boda on the back of a boda!) We loved Kigali. I would certainly recommend it to anyone traveling. It’s a very livable city!