Burundi

February 27–28, 2013

What familiar paving tiles. What familiar puddles on the sidewalk and around it. What a familiar zebra crossing. Is this somewhere in Russia? No, this is Burundi.

Bujumbura

Taking pictures of the monument to the country’s first president and honorary graves behind him is prohibited. You have to get a special permit from city hall.

A monument to someone less important hasn’t been deemed worthy of security guards to chase away chance tourists, so the bust sits covered up until a holiday occasion merits its display.

The idiocy ends there, and a quiet, peaceful, calm country begins. There’s nothing to guard here and no one to guard it from.

The Statue of Liberty, for instance, is left completely unguarded.

The city is located on the shore of Lake Tanganyika.

Which, of course, doesn’t prevent local residents from bathing in a ditch.

The city has fire hydrants.

Which didn’t prevent the central market from burning down a couple of weeks before my arrival.

Now everyone sells their goods right on the sidewalk.

The city has some well-disguised remnants of former Art Deco splendor.

Which doesn’t prevent developers from making the rest of the buildings as plain and generic as humanly possible.

LED street lights with solar panels.

Every storefront is decorated with an artistic mural.

The awesome world of communications.

Roadside billboards.

A passerby.

Children.

Hop!

Burundi is the only country in the world where the bus stop signs are shaped like actual stop signs.

A street.

A street sign.

The license plates of ordinary citizens are white in the front and yellow in the back.

Taxis are obligated to display their license number on their doors (like in Peru, Colombia, or Bolivia). But over the course of time, aesthetic tradition overtook informative significance, so discerning the letters and numbers requires some effort.

Those with no running water at home crowd by the water source with their canisters.

Home water delivery.

Wealthy Bujumburians live up on the hills, where they have a better view of the lake.

Traffic guard rails mainly consist of curbstones laid out in a 3D dashed line along the road.

You have to be careful on the roads here, especially at night. You never know when a cyclist might come at you out of the pitch dark with a dining table and set of chairs on the back of his bike. Or a double bed whose dimensions clearly exceed those of the bike.

Only one trash can was spotted in the entire city, a pretty plastic one attached to a pole. There evidently used to be more, but only one survived.

The one and only mailbox in the city is located at the post office. One of the mysteries of objects’ migration around the world: this mailbox is absolutely identical to the ones in the Faroe Islands (only they’re blue there) or the ones in Denmark (only they’re red there).