I managed to sleep in until about 5am this morning…and then turned on the light in our room which made me slightly unpopular with Kendra. The gym only opens at 6am, but after playing cards on my computer, I gave up and headed down around 5:30…I was able to turn on the lights and do some weights before the staff came down and started up all the machines for me. They were definitely surprised to see me there…oops! I had a great work-out, however, the altitude here is 5,500 feet, so I definitely noticed the altitude!
Breakfast
was awesome. There was a huge buffet to
choose from including passionfruit, which I love! It was a good thing we ate a lot for
breakfast because lunch was quite late.
The restaurant has a bunch of paintings on the walls which are really
colourful. I am tempted to buy one
before I return home. We’ll see.
We had
a briefing where we met some of the other people on our tour. There are 23 people in our group, which is a
little bit big, but I’m sure it’ll all work out. There are 6 people per bus and we are with a
couple named Carolyn and Frank from Minnesota.
At our orientation we were given colourful blankets and tilly-type
hats! I love being dorky! J
At 10am this
morning we went to the Daphne Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage. They are only open between 11 and 12 daily
and it was such a cool experience. There
are currently 21 elephants there, the youngest one being only 2 weeks old! They were all so cute. The workers there fed them bottles of milk
and the elephants played in the water hole and in the red dirt. It was super cute and a really awesome
opportunity to see elephants so close at such a young age!
Before heading to Tamambo at Karen Blixen for lunch
we did a short city tour. We are right
in the centre near the parliament building.
We also saw a couple of parks. En
route to lunch we saw HUGE storks sitting up in the trees along the boulevard. Already in the city the birds are awesome.
Lunch was nice.
It was a beautiful, calm spot that was surprisingly lush. There was an artist painting here and had
many of his paintings displayed. It was
tempting….but not on the first day!!
After lunch we headed off to Karzuri beads. It is a business that was started to create
work for the less fortunate. There are approximately
340 workers, most of whom are single mothers, which walk from the neighbouring
slums to come to work there. The beads
are beautiful and are sold all over the world.
I ended up buying a couple of strands and mom bought a bracelet.
We went to the Giraffe Centre right at the end of
feeding time. We lucked out and the
giraffes were right at the platform when we arrived. They took the food pellets right out of our
hands! We got a tonne of pictures with
the giraffes – they were awesome. One
even stood still long enough so we could get a family picture with it! Yeah!
Before dinner we visited the Blixen Manor. The movie “Out of Africa”, based on the book
and life of Karen Blixen, was filmed here.
It was neat to visit it because I watched the movie before Christie came
here. One of the rooms had a fur blanket
made out of Hyrax – which mom and I saw one of when we were at the elephant
orphanage!
Dinner and lunch were a tad close together…but dinner
was a unique experience, regardless! It
was at a place called Carnivore and was a similar style to melting pot where we
had dips and sauces on the table and men came around with large stakes of meat
and cut what you wanted onto your plate.
It was all very good, but a lot of meat!
Kendra tried the ox balls and dad just couldn’t get his head around it! I think my favourite thing was the
potatoes! Go figure.
Nairobi has about 4 million people. I guess we were in the city on a Sunday, but
it really didn’t feel as busy as that number suggested it should be.
Tomorrow is a bus morning...hopefully I sleep well
tonight so I don’t completely crash in the bus!
Later
-Allison
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