Carl's Big Adventure

OK, after more than a month, I'm back in Uganda and online. Here's all that's happened (well most of it anyway)

1) I took a trip to Europe and visited London, Ireland, Paris and Rome. It was very interesting returning to a world of stop lights and drinkable tab water. We did the quick tour, fitting in the louvre, eiffle tower, Notre Dame, and more in Paris and all the highlights in Rome as well all in a little more than a week! All I can say is I miss cheese, oh how I miss cheese.

This trip was planned before I came to Africa and I though I would use it as a gage on how long I would stay here, if I dreaded coming back, I would pack my bags and head home. If I felt like I was returning to my home, then I would stay. The good news is that I was looking forward to returning to Uganda sooooo.....

2) I've moved to Kampala and will be sticking around awhile. I've hired a lawyer to incorparate a business (East Africa Tech Ventures) and will be processing my own work visa. My hope is to pick up some contract programming from the US and do it from my home here. I'm also hoping to commercialize some of the software I've developed for TiVo, primarily apps.tv. We'll see how it goes, all else fails, I return to Silicon Valley and get a job!

3) I've rented a small two bedroom house a little outside Kampala, in Mukono. It's about a 15 or 20 minute ride into town (sometimes an hour!). It's a brand new house in a compound with 5 houses, two unattached and three attached, I have one of the attached units. The biggest problem so far is water. The landlords had an illegal connection and got busted and had to pay about a $1000 to get a real hookup. This meant two weeks of no water while they were pretending that they had the money to pay for it! Luckily there's a borehole nearby and I was able to pay someone to bring me water everyday. The water is finally back on though like electricity, it's sometimes on. I've been told the water is on for 48 hours then off for 48 hours. When it is on, I have a large tank that fills and is used when the water is off so in theory I would never notice when its off...in theory.

That's about it, mostly I've been running around trying to get things settled, dealing with immigration, they wouldn't give me another extension on my visitor visa as I've been here since April, thus the need for a work visa.

I'll post some pictures as soon as I upload them to Flickr.