I went to Kigali for the first time in over a decade since I moved there in 2012. I went to a conference, which was fine.
I was shocked by how much Kigali had changed, yet not at all. When I lived there, the roads were nice and clean - and that's still the same. But so much of the city had been built up since I was there! There were stores and restaurants everywhere - I remember struggling to decide between 4 restaurants back in the day. There were more commercial buildings, flash, and everything you'd expect in a Southeast Asian country - which obviously Rwanda is not. But you can tell it's working on the economic side of things.
There are also many fancy hotels—a Marriott, a Radisson Bleu, and a Sheraton. In the past, there were guest houses and the once-upscale Serena Hotel (now seen as old and tired). The conference center is small but effective, whereas there used to be none.
On my last day, I went to Nyamirambo for a food tour. There wasn't much there, except for a bus stop where I lived. Now, it's like a downtown area hopping with businesses and restaurants. I was walking down streets that used to be trees or empty spaces. There's even a car-free street with street art and open-air cafes. The food was fine, though I never considered Rwanda a culinary haven.
And yet, the things I frequented when I lived there were also there - the Chinese restaurant, the Japanese restaurant....all of them. It was like the city plunked around its existing infrastructure, a bunch of new, shiny stuff that buttressed and competed with the older stuff.
While so much had changed, I could still see the trauma of the genocide seeping out of some of the shiny new structures. People were shy or nonverbal, and a lot of people who were working in the shops and such still stared at me like I either did something wrong or was super novel to them, though there were white people everywhere.
What surprised me most about Rwanda was how much I had changed since then. The things that used to bother me—the idiosyncracies of the road laws, the stares, the inability to get certain drinks or foods—didn't anymore. Several things that would have triggered me while living in Kigali only made me roll my eyes and sigh while smiling before moving on while I visited.
I'm a much more seasoned traveler now, taking much more stuff in stride than I did back then. So much upset me when I lived in Rwanda, and I think, I didn't know better in many ways and hadn't yet developed acceptance or coping mechanisms to deal with the differences.
So, while Rwanda has clearly changed and grown and become a more sophisticated destination, I have, too.
