Week number two has sailed along quickly with little more accomplished than the administrative work that goes along with settling into a new city and into a new job. Both of us have gotten over the jet lag and appear adjusted to the altitude, but the endless amounts of paper work and random trips to the store has left little time or motivation for any real African adventures. We did manage to have dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse (random, I'll admit) and have drinks at an outside bar that even by Miami standards would have been seedy, but by Nairobi standards it seemed pretty happening.
One of the issues that also has contributed to the malaise is that we have been living out of our suitcases since we arrived and it started to feel like we have been squatting in someone else's house. That all changed Saturday with the arrival of one of our household shipments, so now we finally have more things to fill up the empty shelves and dampen the echoes of our steps on the wooden floors.
Saturday started with our first tennis lesson--well, the first for either of us since we'd been in elementary school--at the court near our house. We faired pretty well, all things considered. Our workout complete, boxes delivered, and possibly a gardener hired (more on that in future posts), we hopped in a cab for the hour-long drive to the Karen area of Nairobi, namesake of Karen Blixen, the Dutch baroness who's life story was made famous by Meryl Streep in the 1985 Oscar winner Out of Africa. The purpose of the day's adventure was to drive to Karen, visit the Blixen house and museum in the Ngong Hills, and pop over to the Giraffe Center to get our first taste of Kenyan wildlife. However, the delivery of our stuff moved our timeline to the right so we chose to have lunch upon arriving in Karen at a place called the Talisman, a splendid restaurant built in the 1920s that is definitely worth the trip, no matter how many Brits just returning from Safari are sitting next to you.
Having both finished great Indian dishes and sharing a dessert, we hopped back into the cab and were off to find Karen Blixen's house (note: Kenya appears to have no indigenous cuisine. Kenyans seem to have adopted Indian food as the native dish despite the fact that it was the English that brought the Indians over during colonial expansion; the only English dish you can find here is fish and chips, but I guess that's really the only one you can find anywhere, even in London).
Only the house closes at noon and it was now 3pm. So, we recharted and headed toward the Giraffe Center. Truth be told, the Giraffe Center is a tourist trap, but its a must-visit tourist trap because the bait is feeding a group of Giraffe's, a rare but fantastic opportunity as evidenced in the below:
Our hands empty and the Giraffe's appetite satiated, we hopped back into the cab and headed for home.
Adorable pictures! : )
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