Malls in Kenya are something else. I still struggle with them to this day.

You park your car. You go inside. You do your business. You come out.

Then the crisis begins.

Where exactly did I leave that car?

You walk around the parking area like a man searching for a lost goat. Same floor, 3 times. Pressing the key and hoping something somewhere responds. Meanwhile there is a security guard watching you with the particular patience of somebody who has seen this exact performance 40 times this week.

The trick I developed

The moment I park, I record a short video showing exactly where the car is.

Not a photo. A video, panning slowly, catching the level, the pillar, the nearest shop, whatever is around.

Then when I come out, I open that video and interrogate myself. Show me where I left it.

It sounds unnecessary until the first time it saves you 15 minutes and your dignity.

If you want to go further, there are 3 things worth adding to the habit.

Photograph the pillar number or bay marking, because most Nairobi parking levels have them and almost nobody looks.

Note the colour of the level. Several malls code their floors by colour precisely because people cannot remember numbers.

Drop a pin on Google Maps before you walk in. It will not give you the floor, but it will tell you which side of the building you are on, which is usually the part people get wrong.

The maps nobody reads

The funny part is that these malls have maps. Proper maps, mounted on walls, telling you clearly, you are here, and this is where you need to go.

But we do not read maps. We ask.

Where is the ground floor parking? Please show me.

There is a whole conversation to be had about why a person will walk past a diagram that answers their exact question in order to ask a human being the same question. I do not have the answer. I just know I do it too.

The ones that finish me

Two Rivers is the one that finishes me. You go up, and up, and somehow arrive on a completely different level from where you started. I have accepted that I will never fully understand that building.

Sarit Centre requires concentration. It has grown in stages over the years, and you can feel it when you walk through it.

Westgate too.

Garden City was not too complicated, I will admit. Whoever laid out that parking deserves something.

Now the actual point

All of that is a long way of getting to the thing I actually want to say.

Move around Nairobi. Especially if you are young.

Every place I visit teaches me something. I see a new business and work out how it makes money. I notice which shops are full on a Tuesday afternoon and which are empty. I see what people are actually spending on, which is different from what everybody says people are spending on.

I meet people I would never have met sitting at home. Somebody asks what I do. Sometimes that turns into work. More often it turns into an idea I would not have had alone.

You cannot get any of that from your bedroom. The internet gives you information, but it gives everybody the same information at the same time. Walking around a city gives you something specific to where you are standing, which is the only kind of advantage that is actually yours.

Exposure is closer than you think

A lot of young people believe exposure means getting out of the country. Save for years, get a visa, go and see how things are done properly elsewhere, then come back transformed.

Sometimes you do not need to travel abroad to be exposed.

There is a version of that experience available to you for the price of fare and a cup of coffee. Go to a part of Nairobi you do not know. Sit somewhere you have never sat. Look at what businesses are doing there and ask yourself why.

The point is not the mall. The point is that something in your head changes when your body is somewhere new, and that change is not available to people who never leave.

Just leave the house.

And if the car goes missing, record the video next time.

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— Elvis W.