Karibu

“Karibu!” beamed Michael at the Nairobi Club, my halls of residence for the next two weeks. Not knowing what it meant or how to respond, but keen not to appear rude, my only response was “ah! Yes, indeed!”, hiding my embarrassing ignorance behind a dumb, bumbling veneer of Englishness. “Karibu. It means welcome,” explained Daniel, the bubbling cabbie. Jolly foreigners...

In the taxi, when Daniel cheerily announced we had arrived at the Club, I was in two minds. The walls outside were steep and stained. Fortress-like from the outside, it oozed Victorian England on the inside. If anything, it reminded me of an English school; dark, looming wood panels on the walls, on the floor, and a large oak table in the “informal” dining room. Hopefully the food won’t consist solely on a variant of cabbage and spludge (the only word to describe that school staple, concrete porridge).

Revealingly, there were posters advertising the World Cricket League dotted around our journey to the Club - interspersed with mobile phone companies demanding our money and, bizarrely, a large mural of Tower Bridge in London.

After a long build up, things were really on the move today with two press conferences at the Nairobi Hilton this afternoon and a terrific opening ceremony at Parklands Sports Club in the evening. Cultural dancers were promised (for the opening ceremony, I hasten to add), and even managed to lure some of the Scotland and Bermudan players onto the dance floor. It wasn’t pretty, but it was very entertaining. Simon Cowell would’ve thrown a hissy fit.