Nairobi - a good animal day

January 3, 2007

I’m back at the Dubai Airport with a 16 hour layover before going back to Saudi Arabia. I’ve decided to stay here and grade the 30+ papers and 70 Unit tests that I must have finished when school starts again in two days. I’ll try to see Dubai another time.

It’s two in the morning and the place is hopping. The shops are all open and packed with long lines at the cashiers. And instead of sleeping, I’m writing in my blog. It just feels like I should be awake. Everyone else is.

I spent a lovely day with Josh, Audra and their kids in Nairobi on New Years Day. I like Nairobi. It is so different from Kampala, there is almost no comparison. The roads, although not perfect, are a thousand times better. There are beautiful trees, greenery, and parks everywhere. The downtown is surprisingly clean with a nice colonial feel to parts of it. There are big, modern shopping centers, a wide variety of restaurants, markets with crafts, and a feeling that you can get all the comforts of home if you’re willing to pay for it. But you’re still in an African city.


The first stop on the Nairobi tour was City Park, a somewhat rundown park, but with monkeys everywhere and fairly tame. They jumped on our shoulders, eating peanuts from our hands. I could have watched them for hours.


We then shopped at a crafts market and a rug store. Josh asked a shop owner in the market to teach him how to play the shell game (I don't know the Kenyan name for it - we had a similar one in the Philippines). I didn’t buy much. Ate lunch at an excellent Ethiopian restaurant, then went to the suburb of Karen (named after Karen Blixen of “Out of Africa” fame). This is an upper-class area with huge estates. Sitting right in the middle of these homes is a giraffe sanctuary for the Rothchild giraffes which are endangered. On one side of the road is a building with a balcony where the giraffes come to eat pellets from the hands of visitors. Their heads are at our face level. Their long tongues stretch out and curl around the pellets as we place them on their tongues. It’s lovely to be so close. The opposite side of the road is a large area of bush where two full grown giraffes live. Visitors can walk around this area in search of the giraffes or just for the fun of it. We hiked around for a while and came across one of the giraffes.

A good day is a day seeing animals.

We went out to dinner in the evening and watched a movie on the computer until late. A good day. Raeleigh was even fun with very little whining.

(Saw a beautiful male and female bird I'd never seen before. The pictures are out-of-focus, but they are worth showing here. The name (thanks to Audra who looked it up for me!) Red-cheeked Cordon-bleu.