7:13 PM - Kenya: A cesspool of guns, violence, and transactional sex--I LOVE IT!

So, I recently did a weeklong stint in Nairobi, Kenya. For the geographically challenged among us (read: American), it's along the Eastern Coast of Africa, just south of the Equator. Leaving aside my reason for taking the 18 hour flight in the first place, let's explore just a few of the more memorable events I experienced while attempting to have a fun time.

It's around midnight, on the side of an unnamed dirt road about 20 miles outside of Nairobi-proper on our way to a popular restaurant aptly named "Carnivore". I'm on my knees along with about 4 or 5 UN representatives, looking down the barrel of a Kalashnikov, singing the praises of the assault rifle to the young man behind it.
"Is that a soviet-issue? 7.62 X 39mm, probably one of the best all-around rounds in existence. Good stopping power, highly accurate. Hell, the gun itself is the model of reliability. You could bury it in the sand out here for a month, fully loaded, come back, pull the trigger, and it'll fire as if nothing happened. That's fucking engineering for you, right?" The guard laughed and told me it was his favorite gun. I told him about my SKS at home, how you could take it apart and clean it effectively using only a bullet and a greasy rag, and its accuracy under a 100 yards (which meant nothing to the kid, they think in meters, those colonial tools!). At first, I was certain myself and all my buddies were gonna be pumped full of lead and left on the roadside--none of us had our passports and the checkpoint leader (the men holding us were more than likely a home-grown militia, not actual police) was giving our taxi driver a world of shit.
Then, a miracle happened: the kid i was talking to went to his boss and started machine gunning Swahili. The boss looked over at us, gave me the stink eye, and waved us back into the taxi. When we finally got to the restaurant about 10 minutes later, I downed a few shots of rum in rapid succession (going one-for-one with the cute Swedish UN chick) and saluted my freakish knowledge of Russian firearms for once again saving me from certain doom.

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