#4: Muguga, Kenya

Success! Internet on my laptop! Just at work for now, but still. This means (now that I still don't have any specific work to do) that I can finally upload some photos. I took a ton but I don't want to overload this thing, so here are a select few plus a couple of stories.

This photo is from our walk on Saturday. It's a pretty typical view of the side of the road on the walk down from where we are staying to work at KEFRI, unless there's forest.

This is where we are staying. Each of those cottages have several separate rooms.

And here are some from our Sunday hike. We walked back down to the field we discovered by accident to check out the widowbirds and see what else there was. We walked to the field, through the field, and through the forest and took tons of photos. There was a bunch of people about, probably because they just got out of church. We walked past a big gathering who had come out for a soccer match at a field nearby, some with vuvuzelas in hand.

I ran into these girls as we were walking to the field. They kept waving and saying hi so I approached them and asked if they wanted their photo taken. They said yes so I took a few and showed them and they seemed pleased. Later on we ran into some people who, when they saw us, actually asked to have their photos taken.

Hallo! By the big field. Someone told us it is used for hay. This is the home of the multitudes of widowbirds.

Descending into the field from the road.

These kids waited like five minutes for us to move up the trail to where they were. Then I chatted a little bit with them and took some photos. They said they wanted a photo with me too, so here is our funny face photo.

Yesterday we went to work (and saw two monkeys on the drive!) and met our boss. Like I said, we still don't have a set schedule but it sounds like we'll be doing some cool things soon, including some field work. Bryson and I wanted to get modems so we could have internet on our laptops back where we are staying, so we rode along with our boss to Nairobi where he had a meeting and were dropped off at a mall in a suburb of the city called Karen. This mall could have been anywhere - there was even an Apple store. We also weren't the only white people around. We picked up modems and then went to a bookstore and got some books for entertainment, and also picked up some snacks from a big grocery/everything store. Then we got some Indian food at the food court for dinner. After that we were picked up and taken back. The drive to Nairobi is pretty terrible. I got a headache from the exhaust - most of the cars are really old and just spew black stuff everywhere. Not pleasant. Also I would never dare to drive here, people cut so close to you and what is meant to be one lane is usually two. But we listened to an interesting program on the way back called "Busted!" or something like that and had some laughs. Alas, when we got back to our place neither of our modems would work. Fail. I have my receipt, though, so hopefully that can get worked out soonish.

Also, yesterday we discovered the cafeteria here - my lunch cost less than fifty cents and was more than I could eat. The strategy is to load up on breakfast at our place, lunch here at work, and then have snacks for dinner. We got hot chocolate today for breakfast which was also exciting.

In other news, I just preordered the new Patrick Wolf CD + bonus disk... a bit much since I'm ordering it from Britain but oh well. Too bad I won't get my hands on it until the end of August! I get a free song download with it too but can't download it right now. Oh well.

Anyway, I'll probably grab lunch soonish. Ta.