Music and musical instruments
Other good buys include music Compact disks (though attempt to listen before purchasing), and musical instruments- for instance nyati, a luo lyre- although it’s very difficult to get quality instruments instead of souvenir
facsimiles. Drums could be bulky and many people even purchase them for tables, but look into the skins happen to be correctly healed. Individuals made to take place one arm, more prevalent around the coast, would be the
most practical as souvenirs. Lamu features its own wind instrument known as a siwa, an enormous side- blown factor typically produced from an elephant tusk, but nowadays fashioned from hardwood.
Shop comes with an excellent and incredibly reasonably listed range, including single bits of fabric or kikois and kangas. The standard masks you will see everywhere are imported-only a number of Kenyan tribes
make masks, the Kikuyu being the very best known, which are exceedingly rare.
Community craft centres
Nairobi has numerous craft shops with charitable status, or connected with development or self-help projects. Although a little costly-and negotiating is not possible-they frequently have
unusual and well-made stock, most of which finds its distance to the Christmas charitable organisation catalogues overseas. A couple of are some distance on vacation, but really worth making special journeys to go to, and they are
good tonics if you are struggling with curio shop fatigue.
Amani ya Juu Riverside Drive. The project utilizes fifty women who’ve been marginalized by poverty and war. It is good for gifts-the boutique sells colourful hand crafted clothes and bags. Matatu#48.
Mon-Fri9am-5pm
Bega Kwa Bega Korogocho projects. Federation of small handcrafts producers in the Korogocho slums of eastern Nairobi, offering sisal bags, bracelets, batiks, furniture and cloth puppets. Have a taxi.
Craft banda Sarit Center, Westlands. Hassle-free browsing and fair prices. Buses #25, #29, #30 and many more.
Kamili Designs Langat Rd, Karen. This textile workshop sells in your area designed, hands printed materials. The designs are usually bold and colourful, available both through the metre so that as cushions, bed linen,
and so on. Buses/matatus #24, #111 or #126. Mon-Fri9am-5pm.
Kazuri Beads & pottery Center Mbagathi Ridge, Karen. Kazuri, meaning “small beautiful”, utilizes nearly 100 formerly destitute women, who make an remarkable number of hand crafted,
mostly ceramic, jewelry and beads. You can view the entire process from shaping and colouring to firing, and gleam pottery showroom. It’s costly, however the stuff is lovely. They likewise have
retail outdoors at Village Market in Gigiri and also the Junction Shopping Center, Ngong Rd. buses/matatus #24, #111 or #126. Training courses Mon-Comes to an end 8am-4.30pm, Sitting 8am-1pm shop Mon-Sitting 8am-5pm, Sun
9am-5pm.
Kitengela Glass from the Magadi road, south of Nairiobi National Park. Inspiring community of glass-blowers and crafts-folks a photogenic creative village. Site visitors are welcome and you will observe,
browse and purchase unhassled. You will need your personal transport to obtain here. It can make for any good extra visit if you are in the Giraffe Center or going to Daphne Sheldrick’s elephant orphans.
Maridad Materials City Stadium roundabout, Landhies/Jogoo Rd, 2km east from the stop. Chapel-based Maridadi was produced in 1966 being an earnings-producing community work for women in a single of
Nairobi’s earliest slum areas-Pumwani and Shauri Moyo. The primary workshop is really a delight if you are into making your personal clothes. A sizable screen-printing workshop (on view in the visitors’ gallery)
produces the number of prints available within the shop. Especially appealing would be the bark cloth prints African peoples before the finish from the nineteenth century. Buses #46 or #34. Mon-Comes to an end 8am-5pm
Mikono Craft Shop Opposite Ratna Fitness Studio, Gitanga Rd, Kawangware, just north of Dagoretti Corner. The opening from the Jesuit Refugee Service, with well- made work (especially beautiful patchwork
textiles) from refugees, and superb Mozambican designs and carvings. Bus #46 or #46B.
Spinner’s Web second floor, Viking House, Waiyaki Way, Westlands. A sizable shop selling lots of nutrients-crafts, textiles, woollen goods and jewelry, a lot of it produced by self-help groups and people,
including Meru’s Makena Textile Workshop. Bus/matatu-any to Westlands.
Undugu upstairs in the Mall Westlands. Using its roots within the chapel, Undugu (“fraternity”)os probably the most energetic society available in the united states and organizes regular led visits for their slum projects.
The store sells a great choice of well-listed, high-quality crafts with more unusual products, for example Ethiopian jewelry, basketwork, and crafts from DRC, Tanzania and Uganda. You might have the ability to
discount riverside furniture
have alook round the training courses. Bus/matatu- any to Westlands. Mon-Fri9am-6pm, Sitting 9am-55.30pm.
Utamaduni Crafts Center Bogoni East Rd, Langata. 18 individual craft shops in a single large house, opined by Richard Leakey in 1991 (a area of the profits visit the Kenya Wildlife Service). It’s
everything you may want, a lot of it made on-site or from street-kid projects quality and process are high. The attached Verandah restaurant is great. Bus/matatu #24. Daily 9.30am-6pm.
Woodley Weavers Chaka Rd, Hurlingham. Recognized to many because the “rug gallery”, this place has a number of area rugs produced by local women, frequently single moms in the Kibera slum, using local made of woll, cotton
and plant dyes. Any bus or matatus to Ngong Rd.
Maasai and crafts marketplaces
If you are after Maasai Crafts (whether traditional handmade jewelry or products composed for that tourist industry), or designs and carvings and crafts generally, the different “Maasai Marketplaces” are suggested, though they
are no more a budget, hot tip they were in the past. Started downtown opposite the publish office within the mid- 1990′s, the audience of Maasai along with other women from rural areas, in addition to a quantity of males, were
moved several occasions by city council askaris and today convene to show their wares at various places through the week: on Friday in the roof carpark at Village Market, Gigiri on Tuesday at
Westgate Mall in Westlands on Saturday or sunday in the Law Courts carpark off City Hall Way as well as on Sunday in the Yaya Center in Hurlingam. They often start around 9am and finished mid-mid-day.
You’ll sometimes find prices well below individuals within the tourist marketplaces, with good usually you will need to bargain challenging what appears as an acceptable cost. The Saturday Law Courts marketplace is
most likely probably the most promising from the three for any bargain.
The Embakasi Village Crafts Market, situated around the Mombasa road in order to the airport terminal (second activating the left soon after City Cabanas Restaurant bus #34 and #34B), is possibly among the
most organized in Kenya, and many products tend to be less expensive than in other Nairobi marketplaces. There’s a place where one can watch the carvers happening, and commission individual carvers.
Kariokor market
Between Rececource Road and Ring Road, Kariorkor Market Road and Ring Road, Kariokor Market S(named following the despised war time”Company Corps” bus/matatu #4, #6, #14, #15, #30, #31, #32, #42, or
#46/46B) is nearer to an oriental bazaar than most marketplaces in Kenya, with permanent cubicles for that traders. Inside, there’s just as much manufacturing finishing happening as selling- you will find sisal weavers,
leather employees, makers of tyre-rubber sandals (“5000-mile, footwear”, it remarkably comfortable ) craftsmen, toy-makers, tailors, hair stylists, along with a row of excellent, inexpensive, amazingly clean eating
places, popular at lunchtime with local employees. Note that you might be mobbed by kids and touts here.
Kariokor is the greatest devote Nairobi to purchase baskets (vyondo), created using sisal, coloured with natural or artificial dyes with garish plastic or with cord made of the bark from the baobab
tree. The cord baskets could be truly exquisite, with small beads use in the tight weave. Numerous cubicles sell vaguely pharmaceutical oddities- snuff, remedies, charms, amulets and so forth -where
you may also get everything from down to snakeskin. Outdoors you will find the odd African literary jewel within the secondhand bookstalls. Clothes, footwear, toys and music
The biggest general market in Narobi is Gikomba Market, off landhies Road, beyond the Country Bus station (to obtain there by trains and buses, take any bus or matatu for Jogoo Road and obtain off at Gikomba).
This can be a place that couple of vacationers ever see, a labyrinth of muddy alleyways, courtyards, and open sewers, it is also a location to see an exciting slice of Nairobi existence, and nearly anything could be
available on purchase, from soccer practice uniforms and electronics to industrial-size ovens. You will find also tailors, she repair shops, hair stylists and various little bars and food stalls. Include someone
you never know the area, though it is easy to obtain lost and Gikomba could be unsafe.
For everyday general merchandise stores, in the CBD, the eastern area of the City Market district is easily the most useful area. Biashara street (biashara means commerce) when the street for materials
and a good option to purchase tents and mospuito nets. For affordable and never-so -cheap imports, the hangar-like Freemark Pavilion in south Uhuru Park has 100s of stalls.
You will find clothes shops throughout, with fashion shops on Standard and Kaunda roads, and much more lower-to-earth gear on Kenyatta Avenue, Moi Avenue and Kimathi Street. Good-value shoes is
offered by the African Boot Co, on Moi Avenue opposite Bookpoint, and Bata, that has numerous branches round the city. Even cheaper shoes are available at Miniprice Shoes Supermarket
on River road.
If you want to purchase toys, you’ll get the best products are in your area made wire-and-fabric gadgets- cars, bicycles, flapping wild birds- that are sometimes usually made in your own home for sons and nephews and
not available. The very best general toyshop within the CBD is Hobby Center in Jubilee Insurance House on Kaunda Street, but Village Market also offers a great toyshop, Toy World.
The large amount of music on Compact disc- whether legitimate, murky, or illegal -makes Nairobi an excellent spot for music fans, particularly if you possess a taste for Kenya’s stunning number of ethnic musical
strands, as well as all the different tracks from elsewhere in east and central Africa, especially Congo. Try Assanand’s and Musikland on Moi Avenue, Melodica on TomMboya Street or, better
still, the host of shops and stalls on and around River Road and Accra Road.
Departmental stores
Nairobi presently has the dubious distinction of getting more departmental stores- a lot more than twenty and counting-than every other African city outdoors Nigeria, supplying an inconvenience-free atmosphere to get
up with regular shopping and business. You will find many of them stuffed in to the western and northern and surrounding suburbs where they focus on the expat and wealthy Kenyan marketplaces. All of them include banks, travel
agents, specialist food providers and a variety of cafés and restaurants.
Junction Dagoretti Corner, Ngong Rd. also called Nakumatt Junction, it includes a sizable Nakumatt supermarket, cinema, book shop, greengrocer, restaurants, a great boutique selling leather
items, the Kitengela glass shop and fashion stores.
The Mall Westlands. Shops and offices together with a branch of let us Go Travel, a sports shop, a French bakery, ice- cream parlour,a 711-style convenience store and various fashion and clothing store.
Buses #25, #29, #30 and many more.
Prestige Plazza Ngong Rd. Includes a large supermarket, cafe and completely new cinema showing the most recent Hollywood blockbusters.
Sarit Center Westlands. A large, established complex, using more than 60 shops and offices, together with a dry-cleaner, any adverse health- food store, a wrist watch repairer, a publish office, a multiplex complex cinema, an
Uchumi Hypermarket, the Arena Fitness center, a sizable branch from the Text book center as well as an Apple computer store. You will find good quality sports and hobbies merchants around the lower first floor. Buses as
for that Mall.
