Interesting Article with Beautiful women… ( Hats are so associated with Joy and Relaxation)

Nairobi, Inventing a City
A boisterous metropolis glows with the promise of a better life, but doesn’t always deliver
By Binyavanga Wainaina
Photograph by David Alan Harvey
The nearly three million residents of Kenya’s burgeoning capital are reshaping a uniquely African city.

For those trying to understand it, Nairobi can be a very slippery city. Four years ago I came back after spending a decade in South Africa—my mother had just died, and I was tired of being away from home. But it was difficult to adapt. I found myself living at the edge of Mlango Kubwa, a slum on the east side of the city, in a cheap hostel called Beverly Hills, where college students and the newly employed lived. That first night there was a flood, and I woke up to see my laptop floating in four inches (ten centimeters) of water.

I slipped and slid and fell in love with this city. Mlango Kubwa is all motion—streams of people finding original ways to survive and thrive. You never get the impression there are fixed and rooted institutions (buildings, legal entities) around which people organize. The organization of Mlango Kubwa is hidden in the unhindered to-ing and fro-ing of people feeling their way through the day…
It was at Beverly Hills that I met Mash (short for Macharia), who reintroduced me to Nairobi. We would walk together down Moi Avenue, the street that leads from Nairobi the international city to the undocumented sprawl of an evolving African city: people and their small, illegal constructions fronting opaque skyscrapers; secondhand-clothes shacks and rickety vegetable stands; wooden cabinets behind which whispered price-setting over watch repairs takes place in Dholuo, the language of Lake Victoria; shoe shiners and shoe repairers soliciting work by keeping eyes on the feet of passersby. These people tell tall political tales that later turn out to be true.

To read the rest of this article, click here…