No kissing allowed
on A Serendipitous Journey (Kenya), 25/Feb/2010 14:16, 34 days ago
On the last leg of our 11 hour bus ride from Jinja to Nairobi, we were all tired of the atrocious Kenyan TV series that was blaring on the bus (the same series we had to endure almost the entire way to Jinja.) My Irish friend Marie had bought a dubbed DVD of chick flicks at our stopover in Kisumu, including Pretty Woman and the Notebook. Marie confidently went to the front of the bus asking if they'd consider playing her movies only to be told by a bus employee that the movies looked‘inappropriate for children’ (there were no children on the bus other than a 2-month old baby). Not one to give up easily, Marie petitioned the entire bus and on a second approach semi-convinced the employee thatthe Notebookdidn’t contain (m)any inappropriate scenes.After cheers from the back of the bus, where we were all seated, the movie started to play but I’m sure totally by coincidence (note the sarcasm) the volume was so low we couldn’t hear it. The bus employee watched the silent screen like a hawk and about 20 minutes in, during the scene when Allie runs to Noah from the ocean wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him on the lips, the movie was abruptly stopped and a small smile may have formed on the employee’s mouth. It was promptly replaced withSarafinawhich contains so many violent scenes that Marie was forced to jokingly point out to the people at the front of the bus that perhaps it might not be appropriate for children either. A Kenyan man explained that“in Africa we are used to seeing violence, but we are not used to seeing love scenes.”