Author: Krisztina

We land in Nairobi mid-movie (didn’t time it well) and exit the huge plane through the back door into the warm yet breezy Kenyan evening. A bus drove us to the international terminal and we pull up all our paperwork. Immigration was easy peasy as we did an Evisa online a couple of months prior that got approved, and we had our proof of yellow fever vaccine. Also we’re white so that helps. Our 5 pieces of luggage came out right away and we easily found the driver Bill’s colleague set up for us. We get to the AirBnB around 11pm and our host, who lives in the building, lets us in and was super nice and welcoming. Then we crash.

We wake up early Wednesday morning and walk to the Yaya Center, which is one of the many shopping malls in Nairobi. Lots of malls here, which I guess makes Nairobi the New Jersey of Kenya. Except that Nairobi is way different than Jersey so nevermind.

We do a quick lap around the mall, do a small grocery run, then sit for breakfast at ArtCaffe, a delicious Israeli cafe chain. Plus they have WiFi.

After an amazing first meal we get new SIM cards and a local phone number at the Safaricom kiosk and Bill is off to work! Jet-lagged or not, people need their solar! He walked to his office from Yaya, all of which is in the neighborhood called Kilimani. I walk back to the AirBnB to put the milk and bottled water in the fridge and look for a permanent place to live. The internet is shotty so I call an Uber to go to a much raved about French bakery in the neighborhood called Riverside. The ride cost $3.

I get the avocado toast and use their fast WiFi. It’s almost like I never left SF.There’s a huge range of real estate here, with some brand new luxury penthouses as expensive as SF. There is also a huge market of furnished and serviced apartments, though they really vary in size, newness, style and price. As an armchair residential real estate expert, I haven’t been able to make sense of the pricing despite looking at hundreds listings. Old, dingy, dark, small, and terribly furnished apartments with no elevator go for 50% more than newer, brighter, bigger apartments with similar amenities (lots of pools and gyms) in the same neighborhood. Clearly everything here is extremely negotiable. After making arrangements with several people to view available units on Saturday, I Uber to another mall. This time in the happening neighborhood called Westlands.

I walk around and look around a bit and decide to walk all the way home, which took about 3 hours. I saw a cool tree, kids playing soccer, lots of crazy traffic with crazy matatu drivers and no traffic signals, and lots of cool buildings. I took a bunch of pictures. It was a wonderful day spent exploring my new city!

Cool tree

After school soccer

Cool mall ramp

Cool building

Cool building being built

Abandoned building mid build

Cool building (and Subway less cool)

I watched/raced Bill walking home from work on a “find my friends” type app that I made him download – mainly so he can see where I am (or at least where my phone is) for my safety. Then we went to dinner at a local grill place. Maybe it was all the sun I got or maybe it was all the walking I did or maybe it was the jet lag, but I was so tired at dinner. Luckily it only took two and a half hours to get our food and luckily we sat right by the restrooms and luckily we were in the smoking section so we had a pleasant experience. Mainly we were just ready for bed.

Thursday was my first day of work at Lynk and I arrived an hour early. #overachiever #iwasscaredoftraffic My ride to work is the reverse commute so it only took about 20 minutes. More on my new job and company later, but it’s already amazing: smart people, cool technology making workers’ lives better while building cool projects, an on site workshop, a dog, a lunch chef, a cat, and lots of design and strategy work for me to do. For dinner Bill and I went to an Italian restaurant which was really good! My pasta dish cost about 10 USD while bottled water is more expensive than beer. #drinkmorebeer

Friday after work we went to a highly recommended hole in the wall joint called Burger Hut in Westlands with my colleagues. The burgers were really good and I was glad to get to know some of my Lynk coworkers better.

Saturday we looked at 11 apartments. 11. It was exhausting. We started at 8:30am and got home at 5:30pm. But we did take a 3 hour lunch break to eat delicious food at Yaya with some of Bill’s colleagues! None of the apartments were exactly perfect, but we started negotiating on two of them. We have to move in on Tuesday or Wednesday as our AirBnB is up on Wednesday. BAH!!!! Our main criteria for an apartment, in no particular order, is:

• reliable internet (no one likes waiting for Netflix to load, but mainly it’s for work)
• back up generator (power outages are a thing here)
• walking distance to a grocery store (walking at night is not encouraged, especially alone, especially if you have blond hair)
• building water supply (I enjoy showering)
• 2 bedroom furnished (for when you all visit we need a guest room!)
• washing machine
• in the Kilimani neighborhood (Unfortunately our offices are not near each other like they were in SF where it was great biking to work together everyday. In Nairobi Bill will walk to work and I will uber (about $5) in the opposite direction of traffic. If we lived near my office so I could walk to work, Bill’s 5 mile commute could take up to an hour and a half because he would be sitting in traffic.)

This morning, Sunday, we are watching the Olympics online. Then we’ll go back to our top two apartments and start the negotiations. Then we are going to a Brazilian steakhouse for dinner! Then back to the Monday grind…

Everyone’s been clamoring for an update, so here’s the long story long of the past week:

Now that we’ve been in Kenya for four full days, our last weekend in San Francisco, which was a last minute comedy of errors, feels like forever ago. We had a great going away party at our empty loft, and felt much love in the fun sendoff celebration.

We made our guests participate in a bunch of activities, including Map Activity (see image), Drinking Activity, and Take Our Crap Cool Stuff Activity.

Folks came with beer and left with toilet paper, poster paper, a night splint for plantar faciitis, an orange hard hat, a big clock, Gatorade powder, a 2,000 piece puzzle of Cinque Terra with the colors already separated into ziplock bags, cleats, mini easels, an adult coloring book, and so much more!

Saturday was a day of packing, prepping for the last trip to the storage unit, and cleaning (gotta get that security deposit back!). We had Chicago style deep dish pizza for a late lunch before we went to hang out with some friends and their home brew beer. Then we played in a night time indoor goaltimate tournament. It was really fun to run around and play some high level goalty to momentarily forget the stress of moving.

Sunday morning we picked up a uHaul and packed it full with the remaining odds and ends that didn’t go to the storage unit during round 1 with all the furniture. We unloaded everything at StorageMart in Oakland (a creepy place where murders have 100% happened), and it all fit! I also found my colleague’s coat that got accidentally left at our place then got accidentally packed up then got accidentally put in storage. Back in SF I dropped Oskar the Fiat 🚗 off with his temporary new mom and went to a super bowl party after halftime. Sunday night we slept on our camping pads.

So far so good.

Then Monday. Our flight time was 1:45pm so we had the whole morning for everything to go not quite right.

Bill had an early morning breakfast meeting while I dealt with my last minute things that were completely avoidable if I had just done them earlier: car insurance stuff (that can only be done via talking to a customer service rep) and unlocking my phone from ATT (which required another many phone calls though it shouldn’t have). I should have also called my bank to tell them I was traveling so my credit card wouldn’t get declined in Frankfurt when I tried to buy a big pretzel on our layover, but there wasn’t time… because as I went to zip up my suitcase for the final time, the zipper broke. Not only did the zipper break but the whole zipper strip came off the suitcase and was no longer attached. It had a great run that old suitcase. Sigh. Anyway, a mild panic set in. It was only 9am, so there was time to Uber to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy a new one (with a 20% off coupon!). I got a bigger one, which at first was good, but then later proved a bad idea.

While I repacked from the broken suitcase to the new one and did the last trash haul and cleaning, Bill went to the bank because we forgot to store our piggy bank (a box of loose change from the past 3 years). There was over 40 bucks of coins, but Bill had to hand roll all of it in those paper rollers, which was a great use of his time an hour before we have to leave for the airport. After he got those two crisp Jacksons, one of which helped pay for the big pretzels during the Frankfurt layover, he had to go to FedEx to send back our sonic internet router. But first he had to print out the shipping label. Which was in his email. Which has two factor authentication set up. Which is normally the best. Except he had already unlocked his phone from his carrier. Meaning he could no longer receive text messages. Text messages with the code for the second factor authentication. He also couldn’t call me to tell me what was going on. More mild panic. Luckily he searched deep in his phone for saved email records and somehow was able to get the shipping label printed, then he sprinted home.

We head off to the airport at 11:30. We arrive exactly 2 hours before takeoff, with our two checked bags each, a carry on, and a personal item. So in other words, a lot of crap. There’s also a 50 pound limit on all checked bags, and a $200 overweight charge. And yup, you guessed it, 3 out of 4 dentists recommend Colgate and 3 out of 4 of our suitcases were overweight. Remember that new bigger, better suitcase from a couple paragraphs ago? Yeah. Not so great now at 70 pounds. So now we’re in the international terminal next to the kiosks and scales with all of our bags open frantically trying to rearrange. And I’m a meticulously OCD packer – very organized and strategic, socks in shoes, soles of shoes not touching nice clothes, next outfit on top ready to go – so this was a real test for me. #personalgrowth

We repack, check the weight, check the time. Repeat. Not stressful at all, no. Then my Patagonia Black Hole Duffle Bag comes to the rescue, which was folded and packed in a suitcase! We transfer 40 pounds of crap essentials to the duffle and pay $200 for an extra checked bag. $200 for 5 bags was the cheaper option than $600 for 3 overweight bags. We high five then fly through the Pre-Check security with enough time to buy a snack, fill the water bottles and pee. Then we were off and I watched/slept through so many movies! #11hoursthen7hours

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know who I am, but WordPress keeps pressing me to use my words and introduce myself. (Oh oh oh now I get it. WordPress.)

I’m Krisztina.

I was born in Hungary, grew up in Southern California, moved with my family to New York, and now I live in San Francisco. Until two weeks from now that is. Then I’ll live in Nairobi.

I play ultimate frisbee and moonlight as an architectural designer. I like pasta, podfasting, and alliterations.

This is my boyfriend Bill.

He works for an amazing pay-as-you-go solar company called Angaza. Since many of their users are in East Africa, the company has an office in Nairobi. He’s a smarty pants who writes the software that makes purchasing solar powered products affordable for folks. He also bakes bread, has a great laugh, and is daaaaaaaamn fine. And he plays frisbee too!

Together we are moving to Kenya! Bill will build out the engineering team at his company’s Nairobi office in addition to his normal software engineering work and I will build physical projects around the city as the Senior PM/Innovation Manager for a tech startup. In a future post I’ll blog about my new job, maybe after I actually start working there. It was crazy that I got two job offers in Nairobi before even getting there. Networking works. Even across the globe.

I am SO excited and also anxious to get everything done before we leave. Here’s a screenshot of our Wunderlist of things to do. Wunderlist is an amazing app. Highly recommend.

Oh! We can check off vaccines! Got 5 shots last week so I’m good to go. Bill got his too. And we just got a storage unit today. Things are happening. This is happening. It’s all happening.

This part where the font changes is where I’m supposed to write a quote. — Tim Gunn quoting John Wooden