Location: Nairobi, Kenya

Pauline and I woke up well before anything was open, so we relaxed around the apartment and leisurely chatted about what to do for the day. We ended up at a little café inside a garden centre called Arbor, drinking coffee and visiting for hours under a canopy of flat topped acacia trees. A slower day was in order after yesterday’s busy schedule!

I always love checking out the markets in a new country, but it can be hard to find the ones that aren’t kitschy or full of tourist trap junk. I had some unfounded idea that the Nairobi Maasai Market (Maasai is an East African tribe) would be full of legitimate local art… but was once again fooled by the mass produced knick-knacks. I swear I never learn my lesson and I have to get this out of my system every time I travel! On the bright side we got to see more of the city on the drive over. I am used to doing a lot of walking around during travel but not only is Nairobi not very walkable, it isn’t particularly safe to do so. Locals call the city ‘Nairobbery’, soooo take from that what you will. I will say that none of that has stopped us from starting to really like it here anyway. As I hoped, my nervousness has settled down and I am feeling much more comfortable now that I understand how to exist here a little bit better.

Something I didn’t expect is just how green Nairobi is. There are massive trees all over the city, often with bright green vines creeping over everything and lush flowers blooming everywhere. Red, pink and purple bougainvilleas are on every corner, crawling over fences and up trees, who often have flowers of their own mixed in.

All day yesterday we were seeing the name ‘Karen’ absolutely everywhere. The neighborhood we were driving through? Karen. The main road we drove down? Karen Road. Karen driving school. Karen medical school. Karen hardware store. Karen food shop. There’s a museum? Better go see what all the fuss is about, Karen! Turns out that there’s a famous Dutch woman named Karen (surprise surprise) Blixen, who fell in love with Kenya and its people in the early 1900’s. She fairly employed hundreds of Kenyans on her massive coffee farm, contributing to the local economy. She also wrote novels romanticizing Kenya, which fostered a strong sense of national pride and attracted visitors from all over the world.

We stopped in at the Karen coffee shop for a little pick me up when I started to feel kind of off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but we decided to catch a taxi back home for a little rest. Unfortunately the driving here is chaotic and doesn’t seem to involve any laws (vague suggestions at best) which meant that I ended up carsick on top of whatever else was going on. By the time we got back to the apartment I basically crawled to the bathroom, and then to my bed for a lay down.

With nothing else major on the docket today we read our books, visited, and when I was feeling more human we ordered in some Kenyan food from Nana’s Swahili kitchen. As much as I really would love to have done more with the day, the last few weeks have been extremely busy leading up to this and I think this is my body telling me to just rest.

Sav