Getting there

Ok, fine, arriving to Goma was a bit of a shocker. The plane could have served any given Luxembourg-Vienna flight, without the cheese sandwich. But then landing in Goma... difficult to describe. As far as I understand it's only used for military/humanitarian/UN purposes, it's tiny, looks like five warehouses have been quickly set up, and the people waiting around, or maybe working there, or maybe unemployed, sit and lay around the buildings, on the grass. The luggages are brought by a minivan from the plane, then unloaded, everybody looks for their own and then the staff simply removes the baggage tags. And they disappear with the passports for an infernally long twenty minutes.

The road from the airport to the base is impressifying: red dust everywhere, and although the traffic returned to the proper side (the right one, haha), but lacks any basic system of rules (I have learnt so far, that here you have to yield to the right when you're inside the roundabout. You have priority going in.), by the side of the road women are selling bananas and avocados, and men sim cards, and in general there is a mass of people on the streets.

Then, like sudden cut in a movie, we stop for a sandwich. We enter a building under (re)construction, with a French-style bakery on the second floor. One that could easily compete with  counterparts in Brussels. It's bright and shiny, comfortable, I guess there must be wifi because half of the clients are buried in their laptops; on the shelves croissants, baguettes, petits pains aux chocolat, chicken sandwiches and strawberry pies. Freshly squeezed strawberry-pineapple juice is served in lovely glasses, and the baguette is fresh and has pesto in it...

This feeling of sharp contrast is the main thing I remember from the first week here: the world on the streets, the markets, even in the few shops is a completely different one from that inside the houses protected with walls and barbed wire fences. The road isn't paved and has potholes that could serve as a playground for my nephew, but inside the compounds you have the feeling you could be in any European city. I've seen apartments that would qualify as „too much” even by Kirchberg standards. You see the generator in the court, because electricity here is like happiness: you have to enjoy it when it lasts, because you never know when it goes away and when it may come back, but once you enter, flat screen tv and wireless connection is basic equipment, the kitchen makes you envy the owner (or his wife), the living rooms are huge, with heavy dining tables , every bedroom has its own bathroom. To be an expat is always a bit absurd, and apparently absurd in a similar way, no matter where you are