Famous in Uganda, and does Doris want money?

Yesterday I had real trouble getting out of bed, I was exhausted the whole day. It was Axel's last Monday night in Uganda and he was pretty keen on going to National Theatre again, the open mic that runs in Kampala each week. Axel lived in Uganda when he was a kid and he was meeting a friend there who he hadn't seen for 12 years.

I initially said I was just going to go to bed early, but Axel kept bugging me and eventually I packed up the guitar and went. To save time, we took boda bodas (2 person motorbikes) to Entebbe road, where we planned to catch a matatu to the city.

A boda boda ride, with a guitar on your shoulder, through slippery, dark, pothole laden dirt roads wakes you up pretty fast. At one point we went through a group of 20 or so boda boda drivers who were all beeping their horns by the light of their headlamps. It was pretty weird, it looked like hell's angels on mopeds.

National Theatre was different from last week. Instead of everyone piling into a cramped room upstairs, there was a large floodlit stage in a nearby park, raised 12 feet off the ground, and a crowd of about 1500 people watching (Axel and I agreed on that estimate). I found the host and told him I wanted to play originals with just me and a guitar, and he slotted me in at number 20.

There was less reggae this time around. Someone told us that because everyone around here plays reggae, anyone who plays anything else gets priority. The crowd was attentive but generally pretty quiet, most people didn't even get applause when they finished.

Axel and I met various people while I was waiting to play. I've met lots of Ugandan's who are really genuine and nice, but there's always some people who come up to you and can get pretty irritating. I get regularly asked for my email address and phone number by people I've known for less than 10 seconds. They'll say they want to meet me, or join my band, or they tell me about how strapped for cash they are and keep going on about the things they can't afford. Random people ask me to buy them drinks. It gets tiring being treated like the walking world bank just because you're white.

I did meet some really cool people though. The sax player from last week hung out with us for a while, and there was a guy called Mandela who kind of acted like our bodyguard for a lot of the night, he helped get rid of some of the annoying people.

Axel was also hit on by the most sexually aggressive girl I've ever seen, called Doris. She was so forward, for several hours we were trying to figure out if she was a hooker. I left the two of them to talk and occassionally looked back to see what was going on. He looked completely bewildered. I don't think he knew how to handle her.

I got Axel to write down some Doris quotes for me, but I'd rather not repeat them. They were pretty damn blunt. He's going to call her tonight.

By about 12:30 I still hadn't been called to the stage, so I went to talk to the host. He told me that because there were so many people waiting to play, anyone who played last week, like me, had been taken off the list. I'd been waiting to play for more than 3 hours. I argued with him for a while but it wasn't doing any good so I went back to tell Axel.

When all our new Ugandan buddies heard that I'd been knocked off the list, they were furious. 6 of them went to talk to the host. Then he came up to me and told me he'd put me on in a few minutes.

The park was still completely packed by the time I walked up onto the stage. There was an MC who told the crowd I was going to play for one minute. I started playing Talk Without Words, and it felt like the whole park started whistling and cheering. About a minute into the song the MC started shouting "stop stop!" into the microphone, but I ignored him and that made everyone cheer even louder. People all over the park were dancing and every time I swung the guitar around the crowd whistled. During the instrumental section the MC did that stupid thing that MC's do, where they shout random meaningless garbage into the mic. It didn't matter. I finished the song, thanked the crowd, and left the stage.

As Axel and I walked out of the park a man came up to me and said he was a promoter for Radio Simba, and asked if I would be interested in performing on the station and having my cd put in rotation. We exchanged contact info.

A taxi back to Ndejje village, and when we got to the gates of the compound, Axel decided he needed the bathroom. As he stood facing the bushes on the side of the road, we both heard a rustling sound. It was too dark to see, but it sounded like a snake. Axel zipped up as quickly as possible and hopped away from the bushes, and as we stood waiting for the guard to open the gates of the compound, we heard a soft rattling about 5 feet away. We were thankful to get inside without incident.