Kinshasa is a city of 9 million people, but we live in a neighborhood called Gombe where there is pretty much everything we need. Come to find out, not surprisingly, the Gombe was the neighborhood where the Belgians lived during the colonial time when there was pretty much an apartheid system in place. Congolese were not allowed here.
One of the first things you notice is the complete lack of any traffic rules. Really, you can do whatever you want because everyone else is. If there is a stoplight at an intersection and it is working, it's this weird sideways thing that counts down to the green light.. but no one pays attention. No one even pays attention to the snazzy traffic robots.
My advice based on not very much driving experience? Go slow, laugh a lot, roll down your window and use your "thumbs up" to ask people to let you go. So far, so good.
The other thing that that was interesting was to see this recycling billboard. Put that in the traffic light/robot category. ("good effort, no one is listening")
There is so much to discover here, but one of the things I like is that people from Kinshasa are called Kinois. Sounds like quinoa :)
