To Inside or Outside the World, and How

As an expatriate living in strange places, I have to find new ways to perceive, and take part in, the life around me.

Of course, these places are not strange to the people who live there; to them, I am the stranger.  I walk about in my obvious outsider skin and look like a freak.  Sometimes, this difference makes me stay inside instead of go out - I'm tired of being odd.

My "inside" at the moment is the Ubuntu Hotel in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi and my new 'strange place.'  The other day I was feeling freak-ish and closed in, so I pulled back the curtains and looked out.

Glancing left, I saw the walled compounds of Bujumbura rise to meet the hills, still lush and green despite a month of dry.  I looked for, but could not see, the source of the deep drumming pounding into my room.  Even nearby palm trees swayed to the energy of those beats.

Well, actually, the palm trees moved to the breeze from the lake.  Glancing to my right, I saw Lake Tanganyika, a glossy blue surface rippled dark with waves.  I had to stop myself from smelling salty air - it's only a freshwater lake, though it looks like an ocean.

I rolled both windows open to let the breeze into my room.  Though I didn't want to go outside, at least I could let the outside in.

This blog intends to be a record of what I find when I do go beyond the window, beyond the door, beyond the compound wall and exchange the world inside for that big, crazy out-of-doors.

These days I often make the inside-to-outside leap on the bicycle I brought from the US.  Though the bike makes me stick out even more - look Mom, there's a white man in an outlandish helmet pedaling up our road! - it also gets me out.

When I don't want to engage with the newness around me, or don't know how to, I get on my bike and go somewhere. Anywhere.  Then the bicycle becomes my way of seeing the world, and by "seeing" I mean more than just looking.  I mean - I don't know quite how to put it - a deeper way of seeing, a biting into, a true and symbiotic experience-ing of the place that my difference sometimes isolates me from.

So I'm calling this blog "Biking Bujumbura" not because it will be all about bike riding (it won't), but because my bicycle is, at present, often my actual and metaphorical way of seeing this new place where I've landed.  In the midst of the unfamiliar, the familiar exercise of riding becomes my interpretive lens.

I pedal myself into the world, and the world takes me for a tour.