22:45, 11 June, 2011

This trip is already AMAZING. I am currently sitting in the guesthouse bedroom of the most incredible house you could ever imagine. We are in Nairobi, staying at the home of a previous graduate student of Kay’s named Stephanie who married a Kenyan safari driver and now lives here in a “suburb” of Nairobi with him and her children. She lives less than a kilometer from Nairobi National Park, and has already warned us that there will be monkeys trying to get into our bedroom in the morning, and warthogs running across her yard. Sometimes leopards skulk behind the building. We are also likely to hear lions and hyenas at night, and we shouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of stuff has fallen from the ceiling in the morning due to the geckos. And let’s not forget the rock hyricees that will be screaming as they run across the roof. I expected all of this when I stayed in Nakuru and the Masai Mara two years ago, but this is the city! Even as I sit here writing this next to Aurelia we keep looking at each other with huge smiling eyes because there are intermittent noises coming from the surrounding trees. I think the current one is a rock hyrax, and something definitely just ran across our roof. AFRICA.

On my flight from Detroit to Amsterdam, I sat next to a seventeen-year-old girl named Josi, whose father works for the Kenyan Parliament...no big deal. She was SO NICE and down to earth though; she is going to high school in the states. When we flew over Ireland, I was very tempted to use the emergency oxygen mask as a parachute and jump out of the plane to glide down and say hello to a certain Miss Caitlin Pingel, but the laws of physics prevented me from doing so. In Amsterdam, I met Aurelia and Adrianna; they are both WONDERFUL. (Okay, now there is a low growl outside of the house...just an update.) I knew right away that Aurelia was a kindred spirit when she told me that she would prefer to be in the camp where hippos and lions periodically crash through, and Adrianna’s excitement was equally inspiring.

Arriving in Nairobi, Kay and Dave (the graduate student heading this research experience), picked us up in a delightful old stick-shift jeep, not unlike the safari ones we used during the mammal behavior study abroad. It was so good to see them! They seem almost as excited to have us here as we are to be here. Poor Janie got stuck in Paris until tomorrow though.

Driving past the acacia trees in the dark, I could see little white egrets packed in the branches of acacia trees like huge popcorn balls, sleeping. Eventually we drove down a bumpy dirt side road in the rain (although it is the dry season), and came back to a beautiful house where two sweet Maasai dogs came running to greet us. Kay introduced us to Stephanie, and Aurelia and I opted to stay here, while Adrianna went with them to a different little house the lab owns. There is an askari (guard) outside of our house (Nairobi can be quite dangerous; walls surround many of the houses with big shards of glass poking up on them, while other houses are literally surrounded by electric barbed wire). We are just getting ready to hunker down in our mosquito-net enclosed beds for one of the two most luxurious nights we will know for 2 months.

Hopefully this is coherent as I am very jet-lagged. Time to get some sleep. So good to be back here! I am supposed to be prepared to wake up to a curious three-year-old boy peeking inside. :-)