Living Large in Kigali

Arrived in Rwanda last night after an uneventful thirty-hour trip. I'll be working here for the week.

For what's touted as a densely populated city, Kigali sure feels quiet, and exceptionally laid back. It's quite lovely really, its dozens of hills and valleys not dissimilar to San Francisco's, and arguably the safest capital city in sub-Saharan Africa.

But barely a minute has gone by in the last day without my mind wandering to the genocide. To the fact that fifteen years ago, almost a million people, an eighth of the population, were not just murdered, but butchered--hacked into pieces of person-meat. I keep thinking about how every adult I talk to witnessed it first-hand. I know the history. But it still doesn't explain how so many regular people could have been pushed so suddenly to that level of brutality. I opted against heading to the genocide museum today, the only real tourist attraction in the city. I feel obligated to go, but on my first full day, with jetlag seeping in, I just couldn't seem to put myself through the emotional wallop.

On a completely separate note, two memorable moments of the trip so far came:

• When, in response to my explaining to a porter at my hotel that the reason I was passing on the welcome drink he offered was that I'd already had a lot of water to drink on the plane (in fact, I was passing because I have a serious fear of cholera), he looked utterly baffled and said with the utmost sincerity, "Can I ask you a question? What do you do about the peeing when you're way up in the airplane for so long?"
• And when, during a stopover in Brussels, a twenty-something kid who works in one of the Air Brussels lounges told me that when I first came in, he was certain I was "the American actor in that movie, the Hulk," which he'd already watched three times. "The last time was just this morning." He said he was so excited to see the actor who played Bruce Banner (yeah, he didn't think I was the Hulk himself) just passing quietly by as if I were no one particularly important. The truth is I actually do get mistaken for Edward Norton with some frequency. Seriously. I really do. No, I'm not making this up.