At the Market Place

Today I went shopping with a coworker of mine, Ada. She is very nice and knows Nairobi well. She picked me up at the guest centre at 10:00 this morning. We then took a bus to the main part of town. With the buses, there is the driver and then an attendant. The attendant is in charge of taking your money (it only cost about 40 cents), alerting the driver when somebody wants to get off, and the attendant are in charge in selling the seats. The buses get packed to the brim and then that is when they move. My first bus I rode skimmed a motorcyclist, and ran over one of those lifts used to move boxes. There was a lot of traffic this morning, so the ride took longer than Ada expected. It was fine though and we finally got to the main part of town.

Just as we were about to head to a market, a lady stops us. She wasn’t from Nairobi and she wanted help with the buses from Ada. Ada took her to a bus and told the man where she wanted to go. While she was explaining, the man that sells the seats came up to me. In Swahili first, he tried to sell me a seat. After seeing my confused look, he reverted to English. Of course it was still hard to understand…. The streets here seem long and very hard to pronounce, and I only know the street I am on.

After everything was settled, we went to a maasai market. This is an outdoor market that is only up once or twice a week. I bought a pashmina scarf and a batik with African animals on it. The man selling it wanted me to pay almost 4,500 shilling for it (almost $50 US dollars) I finally got it down to 1000 shillings. I thought this was much more reasonable (that is $10 in the US). Ada and I left the maasai market then and went to the Hilton. It had two little shops here for tourists. I really liked these little shops. I got some things there, including some scarves, an African dress, statues, and jewelry. I only spent about $25 (USD) today! 

We then went to a pizza place and had a chicken pizza. When the pizza arrived, it had chicken, bacon, barbecue sauce, and corn. The pizza was very tasty. As we were leaving, we passed by a store that serves waffles, piled with ice cream and whipped cream, the drizzled with chocolate, caramel, strawberry, whatever sauce you prefer, the topped with candies all over.

We decided to call it a day in the town, boarded the bus and rode back to icipe. We decided to take a walk around the campus quick. Icipe is building a new building for bee research. This is very exciting, and will be very good for the bee research. It will be finished around January. Ada is hoping I will be able to come back and see it. She is already trying to figure out what I could do here if I wanted to work here. We went to look at the construction site, and it looks like it will be a very nice building and very big. Honestly, I wouldn't mind coming back just to visit….

I have lots of plans for next week and I am really looking forward to my summer! I am hoping to go to another market soon with Ada and James. James thinks he will help influence sellers to give me a fair price. I am hoping to go to a children’s home soon and I will also be going on a safari walk soon. I have also been told I should see the slums. They say it will be an experience that will change my perspective on life in everything.

  Summer will fly by. I feel so blessed to have been given this opportunity. I can’t thank everybody enough! I don’t think I brought enough thank you cards with me this summer….