(ill add pictures to this post when they are online)
Saturday 31s of July, 2004
Showing up at the office in the early afternoon has sort of been a trend for us on the weekends. It isn't expected of us to be here on Sundays at all, and on Saturdays we usually come in during the afternoon. I thought this would be just another Saturday afternoon, but I was wrong. We showed up at the office around 1pm and after only being there for about 20 minutes, we received a phone call telling Sean and I to go to the airport ASAP for a flight to Gisenyi. In Gisenyi was an opening party for the new Kivu Sun hotel that the president built. So Sean and I left right away to go to the airport. Right before we left the office we got another call saying that there was only room for sean because they couldn't get a hold of Sal, the other heli pilot, so Greg was going to come back to pick us up. I decided that I would go on the trip to the airport anyways because nothing seems to be final around here, and I had a video camera, and wanted to get some video from around town too, so I decided to use that opportunity to do that as well. Sure enough, just before we got to the airport Patrick got another call saying there was enough room for me too.
We got in the Heli and did our 'taxi' thing to the runway, as I described in an earlier post, this process just seems silly to me and I don't know why they require us to do it. Once we were in the air I took lots of video of the terrain in Rwanda on the way to Gisenyi, which you can see by downloading the 'heli_and_kivu_sun.wmv' video linked here and at the bottom of the previous post. When we arrived in Gisenyi in the chopper, we did a flyby of the new hotel, and then flew over to the airport. The airport was very small, with a building about the size of a large Starbucks. There were two small planes parked on the small tarmac and another Akagera Aviation heli that Greg had taken to get there. A driver was already waiting for us at the airport, we just hopped in and he took us through the city and to the new hotel. Since the president was at the hotel, there was an insane security checkpoint to get inside. It was one of the better security checkpoints I've been through, checked up and down, through a metal detector, and made us open our pocket knives, which they let us take, and they made us turn on our cameras. Once inside it was just like any other nice hotel, large ceilings, fresh flowers in the front, and nice little 'things' everywhere. There were lots of people there and the same dance group from the wedding I went to was there performing on the back lawn. It looked as if the pool was not yet finished, but the hotel was located on Lake Kivu so even without a pool, people could swim.
After checking out the hotel, we got to meet with the president, or otherwise referenced as 'HE' for His Excellency. It was very cool to meet a president, and in such a calm and laid back situation. We sat in a small bar on the couches and talked for like 20 mins about what we have been working on and how we see the future of Rwanda with the infrastructure that's being built. Was yet another experience that ill remember and I've got the picture (below) to prove it.
On the way back to the airport I got some decent video of what the city of Gisenyi looks like, so check that out. More poorly paved roads and tons of people in the streets, but the look and feel I got in that city was very different than the feeling I got in Kigali, don't quite know why, but it was very interesting.

Sunday 1st of Aug, 2004
Sunday, always a restful day, unless stuff at the office doesn't work. We woke up and were not connected to the internet, so to the office we went. We ended up replacing our main router three times because it was having issues, good thing we had some spares in our stock. We ended up working all day

Monday 2nd of Aug, 2004
Today I walked too much, ended up walking from the office to kist and back in addition to the multiple round trips to the office from home. We also got the ministry of education hooked up onto our fiber network, they are our first customer to be connected to fiber.

Tuesday 3rd of Aug, 2004
Rested today, stayed home almost all day. Did a little work on the site from home, writing some knowledgebase articles and did some research on weather stations. BTom came over in the afternoon and I started to show him some of the basics of video editing on the computer using premiere. I don't know if he followed or not but I think he thought it was cool. I also worked and finished the four videos I had been working on, they are now all online on one of the previous posts and on the lglan.net forums. Havana was our restaurant of choice for the night, it's a nice little pizza place across town. They have a cool oven that seems to glow through the restaurant. This time instead of having a pizza I had a calzone which we had all been craving for a while. I wasn't able to finish mine, but I saved half of it for tomorrow's lunch. After dinner we all went to the office and played a little battlefield 1942 which we haven't done for quite some time. I think I've been battling a slight cold, I don't seem to have much energy and I don't want to do anything, nor have I been very hungry. Hopefully it will pass soon.

Wednesday 4th of Aug, 2004
Researched weather stations and remote GSM Terminals today, trying to find a way to get weather data from a remote location, actually mount Karisimbi, the volcano we climbed last week. Finding a way to get real-time weather data back to our office from there is really the next step for planning what we want to do there. On a perfect day at the top the heli can land, but right now there is no way to identify the 'perfect day' without actually flying there to see. Today I still felt a little sick again, no energy and no will to do anything, though I made myself go to work and I did get some things done, great progress was made at mineduc today too. Minar was our choice of restaurants for tonight. Minar is probably the only Indian restaurant in Kigali, and even though its expensive, it's worth the price, they have some of the best food we've had in Rwanda

Friday 6th of Aug, 2004
Food poisoning is a bitch. I ate something last night that didn't agree with me. Going down it was excellent but in the morning I woke up to go throw it up. I then again threw up a few more times through the course of the morning, but by 2pm I had taken some medicine and it along with the water I drank stayed down, so I ate a little lunch and headed to the office. By the evening I was feeling much better and we went with all of us now, joel included since he is now back from paris, and mike, to minar for dinner. It was again expensive, but very good indeed.