eclipse, taxis, kenyan cops, & kenyan meat

what a crazy night. don't even know where to start. i think i'll just give a brief summary, and if i still have energy in the morning go into more detail.

started my readings on threads for java. still confused, but i think i might be going somewhere with this. i think once i master this i can do some powerful stuff. i mean, being able to run multiple things at the same time is pretty cool stuff. asked michael about threading and he gave me an example of a person sending a text message, while still accessing the user interface. i also found a bunch of new sites that had some great java tutorials on some advance concepts.

went to strathmore university in the afternoon. that's when the headaches began. somehow eclipse didn't install correctly, because some parts of it were missing, like trying to create a new project, but can't create classes, interfaces, etc. so we had to go through hours of figuring out what was wrong, trying out different things, pretty much trial and error. we had to reinstall the java sdk, reinstall and delete the old eclipse, and delete the old workspace before it finally worked. we still ran into issues of not being able to access eclipse, but i won't go into detail cause i'll just get more headaches and develop more pimples.

called a taxi to take us back home, but it didn't come for like a good hour, until we saw a random taxi drop someone else off, so we just hopped into that and got home. we decided we wanted to get chombo for dinner. chombo is suppose to be like exotic african meat, anywhere from chicken and beef, to goat, crocodile, and who knows what animals you and i can think of. apparently we must have pissed off many taxi drivers, or the network, cause the one we called for took forever to come. it never did come. we were going to give up, and not eat dinner at all. but i was frickin hungry, and wanted some meat, cause oh yeah we worked out at the gym today, and needed to feed my muscles.

so my chinese side came out, and told michael to call another taxi and that i would talk to him or her. apparently i had to magic hands today, cause most of the computers i was able to fix up with eclipse. called the first guy, and told him we needed a taxi from our apartment to the restaurant. he wanted 600 shillings, and i said too expensive, and wanted 400. argued for a while, and then he hung up. i thought i was being too rude and aggresive. called another taxi, and this time a lady picked up, so i decided to have a more nicer voice. got our 400 shillings, and off we went.

thought everything was going to go smoothly, until we got pulled over by the kenyan police. yeah, that's when i first got my taste of corruption. so they bullied us, and said how zach didn't have his seat belt on. i don't think kenya has a seatbelt law, but anyhow, they threatened to take us down to the police station. oh boy, i was scared, almost crapped in my pants. michael was real calm, and asked what was the fine. 5000 shillings!!!! wtf mate??!!! so in the end, we paid 3000 shillings and they let us go. see how bad that was, we had to bribe the cops, and they went along with it. they got money, and we were just students, teaching other students programming. it was so messed up. i'm telling you, i would've stood up to those guys, but when i saw them and their AK-47's, i was like, shit, i'm dead. but i'm safe, and during dinner michael was joking about how if the next time this bullsh*t happens again, we'll just go down to the police station, and hopefully the U.S. embassy will help us out.

dinner was great. had chicken and goat meat, along with African Tusker to gulp everything down. tasted delicious, and had a great time with the guys. our waitress seemed to be really interested in us, or me, but she asked us what we were doign in kenya, and other stuff like that.

so to summarize: headaches with installing eclipse, waiting for taxi that never came, harrassed by kenyan cops, lost 3000 shillings, and ate a hella of a dinner. yeah, i say we had an awesome night ;)