Elephants, Heroes and more

Huh, Apparently it's 26 degrees inside. Toasty. I've had to come and sit outside where it's a chillier 18 until the open doors and windows cool the house down a bit. I've put on a jumper, don't want to catch a cold, brrr, 18. Hee hee.
So, I am sat on the veranda, supping my tea (black unfortunately, not bought any milk yet) and listening to the crickets (the insect, not the sport!) in Kapenguria. It is nice to stay here for a change rather than down the road in Makutano, although I may have to pay it a visit tomorrow to buy some supplies. This place is great, apart from that there is no alcohol allowed. It's a missionaries place, or something, for the Lutheran Bible Group Kapenguria (or something to that effect). It's a rather large compound and I think missionaries stay here sporadically, seemingly with their families, and while they are not here the houses are rented out to other people. Not quite sure how they found it, I think Leila and Mike stayed here first but I don't know if they discovered it or were sent here. But it's great. Until Wednesday when Matt, Kerry and John (a new attachee from Tanzania, archaeologist, very eager) will be joining me, I have the place to myself. It has 4 bedrooms, a couple of which have Donald duck comic books in them, and mine has what appears to be a trapdoor. Don't know where it leads, and I'm not looking tonight. Perhaps tomorrow in daylight. I've seen too much Supernatural lately, and Evil Dead swims in my head whenever I think of it. Not quite as old and rustic looking as the Evil Dead one though. And hopefully doesn't contain, well, the evil dead.
Hmm, there's a dragonfly buzzing around the shelter above my head. I wish he'd stop.
Anyway, back to the house, there is a nice bathroom with an electric shower. A huge kitchen which even has tea, coffee and sugar left in it. Sadly no milk though. Wish I'd brought my whitener sachets with me. Oh and a little larder area. There is a large dining area and a small sitting area with wicker, cushioned seats in it and a table in the middle, which I find odd. These religious types eh. Also a bookshelf, but all the books are in, erm, foreign. I've not actually looked close enough to tell which European language they are in yet. But ah, anyway, I shall stop rambling on about having a house now. I can't wait to get back to the UK and have a place of my own, even if it's a room with shared facilities. Although I will probably miss sharing a room.

So, since I've been back in Kenya I've been pretty busy. I've been rushing around all over the place trying to get photos and newspaper articles, and etc etc. Mostly successfully, but there are still some photos which I don't have, so I may have to do a trip to Kitale at some point. Anyway, I got all the info I needed for the boards and made them over the easter weekend. Well, ok, I had one day where I did nothing at all, apart from get up late, do a bit of washing and potter around. And watch Supernatural obviously. The Friday I had waited around for three hours for the guy with the photos, and then the ones he brought were rubbish. But hey, I used them for the boards instead. And the rest of the weekend I got up late and then worked on the boards. Monday and Tuesday nights I stayed up until 1.30am doing them, and then got up really early the next morning to carry on. And they were finally finished with all corrections made and Kiswahili translations of the biographies added at the lest minute, and taken to the printers on Wednesday lunchtime. *phew*

I was then meant to be coming up here on Thursday, but as I hadn't managed to get the photos yet I decided to stay around until the weekend (not to mention the fact that I was shattered and needed to stop being so manic for a couple of days, AND there was the promise of elephants on Saturday) so I booked my ticket to come on the bus on Sunday instead. Thursday and FRiday I chased around after things, and then Saturday we all went to the Elephant Orphanage on the outskirts of Nairobi. I have put some photos up on my jalbum, but I did it in a rush in Java and they ended up really bad quality (I was trying to minimise the amount of time they took to upload and the space they would take up when added) so I will do it again properly when I get back to Nairobi. I also tried to upload them to facebook, but after a successful Monkey album, the elephant one just wouldn't work. humph. So, who is all I hear you ask (well ok you didn't but I feel like telling you). The people staying at the guest house at the moment are Ida, Swedish, doing African Studies MA at Oxford; Zoe, British and also doing African Studies at Oxford; Laurence, British and yeah you guessed it, doing African Studies at Oxford (they get money for fieldwork, and as it is AFRICAN studies, they tend to come to Africa. I've met 5 of them in the last week including these three, as their friends keep popping by on their way in or out of the country); then there is Hanna, Dutch, doing her phd and Nairobi is her last of many African countries where she's been researching); and not to forget John, the Tanzanian attachee who just started last week (and who is very very eager). But John didn't come with us to the elephant orphanage. Which is good as the 5 of us only just squeezed into the taxi as it was.

So, Saturday, Elephants. We set out at the punishingly early (for a weekend) time of 9.30 and all squidged into the taxi. We needed to arrive at 11am as they only open to the public between 11 and 12 every day. This is so the elephants don't get too used to people. Not sure how well that's going as they seemed quite at ease with our presence. Anyway, to continue with the story, there was a traffic jam just coming up to the entrance of the park. So after sitting there for a while our driver turned us round and tried to get us in through the other gate. Which we weren't allowed to do, so we went back to the queue of traffic and then got out and walked. We were almost at the entrance to the park when the jam got sorted out and our taxi went past us. He picked us back up at the entrance and drove us the rest of the way into the park to the orphanage and we arrived in time. yay! The place was full of mzungus. Some of whom were rather annoying, but we ignored them as best we could and had a wonderful hour with two lots of baby elephants. I took about 300 photos (I had the shutter on continuous some of the time) and several videos, which I can't wait to put up. Might have to edit the good one though as it was about 8 minutes long! They were so cute, and they played and some of them were naughty, and they were just adorable! I seriously considered adopting one of them so that I could come one evening to see them put to bed, but then decided against it as I have no way of getting there by myself and the taxi there and back cost us 2700ksh (which when split between 5 isn't so bad).

So that was our elephant fun, and after than we just headed back to the guest house. I attempted to make Houmous without a recipe, which went badly as I couldn't really remember it very well and the blender wouldn't blend it properly as it was too thick. Once that fun was over I headed out to Java with Hanna, Laurence and Ida to use the internet (L & I were also meeting someone for interviews) as it was down all weekend. I stayed there until 6.30, when I hurriedly walked back before it got dark, just, and then packed up my stuff for this week.
Hanna made risotto for dinner, and we had a lovely group meal (without John, he said he had already eaten and he was working) and drinks before another Oxford girl arrived to stay with the others for a couple of nights before heading back to England. Then we got out the monopoly board. Woop woop. We sure know how to have fun. :) It was a good laugh actually, John joined us but wanted to just watch for a while before starting to play, but we explained that it takes a long time to play and that we would teach him as we went along, which Laurence and Zoe did admirably, with the rest of us chipping in now and then, and with a few discussions over what rules we were using and what rules other people have used in the past, etc etc. Anyway, good times. We had 7 players, which soon trickled down to me, laurence, John and zoe as Hannah and Ida decided they wanted to go out dancing, and Lena wanted to go to bed (having travelled from Tanzania). Zoe won in the end, I became bankrupt after landing on two of her properties with hotels in one go (I threw a double), and I went to bed at about 1am, again. Having to be up at 6.30 to catch my bus the next morning. Silly me.

Anyway, that is me up to date. This week I will be mostly racing around like a mad thing trying to get everything done. I was going to do some work tonight but now it's 9pm and by the time I've replied to emails it'll be late enough for me to snuggle up in bed with either my scary book (Sarah Waters' new one) or with Supernatural. In a large creaky house all on my own. Gonna have great dreams tonight! :)

Oh and I just saw the hugest mosquito ever, almost daring to land on me although l'm liberally repellented. Oooh! And I just came inside to plug in, and found that the stereo has a cable that I can plug into my iPod! Woo! Musack! It's the oldest stereo I've seen for a long time. No CD player even, but it has surround sound apparently.

Anyway, yes, goodnight peeps!