Mombasa: Now with more puppy

I wasn’t planning on another post today but it has been raining since the middle of the night so there isn’t much else to do.  But instead of going back to where I left off, I will give a bit of breaking news:  apparently we may have a new puppy.  You may remember that yesterday I let the puppies onto the deck. They came back this morning after Anke got up.  She was petting them outside of the gate when one of them shoved through the grate.  She made herself right at home and won’t leave.  She has also made Anke and Alina (her daughter who you haven’t met yet) fall in love with her.  So I guess she lives here now.  Her name is Lamu.  She is the biggest of the four and the boldest but a total mush.  She will flip onto her belly at the drop on a hat. 

Making her wet self at home on the deck furniture

Whatcha doin'?

Ok, back to my arrival on Friday.  It is all a bit of a blur.  Benjamin drove me from the airport.  He is a driver somehow associated with Hemed who is somehow a partner with Anke in her schools.  As you can see, I can’t quite figure out everyone’s place in this story.

Anke was home to greet me.  As imagined, she is lovely (looks and personality).  Big hug.  Tour of the house.  The house is huge.  Three bedrooms and a big living/dining area.  There is a laundry room off the kitchen with a washing machine shared with the neighbour.  The kitchen contains the basics. 

Anke's office

The dining room and living room if we
didn't live on the deck.

The hallway to bedrooms and bathrooms

My room, sans bed which arrived later that day

The entrance

The wonderful, excellent,
best place to be in the world deck

As you enter the front door

The kitchen

Front of the house

At some point during the tour, Alina appeared.  She is also gorgeous and looks like her mom.  She is 19 and just graduated high school in the spring.  She is here for the year helping Anke with the schools.

Alina

I put my stuff in my bedroom which was completely empty.  No bed yet.  Which was just as well because if I could have flopped onto a bed, I would have.  But it wasn’t even noon yet and I wanted to try to get onto Kenya time as quickly as possible.  Instead I had shower.  There is a double room bathroom across the hall from my bedroom, one room for toilet, the other for bath. 

A word about water pressure.  There is none.  There is especially none in my bath.  I have since started bathing in Anke’s en suite.  She has an actual shower, my bath just has a shower hose.  Either way, don’t try to condition your hair.  Apparently there is hot water but it has to be turned on.  So far, I have only needed the cold.  Thank you Mexico for the excellent training.

Once I had showered and changed my clothes, Alina went to the Kencada school and Anke and I went to explore the beach.  It is called Burburi Beach and apparently a bit of a tourist hot spot before the tourists fled due to terrorist activity and Ebola freak out.  Now the beach is essentially deserted except for the local trying desperately to sell their good and services to the few tourists who wander by.  Fortunately, they all know, or at least recognize, Anke so we were not inundated. The beach is long and beautiful.  I have no idea how long we walked or how far.  By the time we got back, I was sweaty, blistered and mildly sunburned.

Look right

Look left

A quick rest and then we were off to the mall to buy groceries and a mattress.    Anke has a car but Hemed was driving it a couple of weeks ago and was in an accident.  What with insurance and repairs, it is still out of commission.  So we took a tuktuk.  Our driver was Ramone.  Anke always calls Ramone when she needs a tuktuk.  She is so nice, she likes to support the people who she meets and likes.  I suspect there are a lot of locals who are happy to be in Anke’s orbit.  When Ramone arrived, he had Aline with him so she came to the mall too.

Ramone.  He has a Bob Marley/Rastafarian thing going on.  

The City-Mall Nyali is very Western.  It has the usual stuff, a shoe store, lingerie, office supplies, a health food store etc.   The grocery store is pretty standard.  Food, booze and electronics on the first floor, furniture and hardware (and probably more) on the second floor.   Anke went upstairs to find a mattess and Aline and I shopped for some groceries on the first floor.  But, first and most importantly, we had to find a coffee machine.  Anke had mentioned that they didn’t have a coffee maker.  That had to be remedied before breakfast the next day as far as I was concerned.  I picked out an off-brand Bodum because that was the only choice really. 

Yogurt, fruit, veggies, fish, coffee and some other stuff.  I asked if Anke and Aline eat bread.  Anke only had some dense, dark German bread, practically barely-moist Wasa, so I wanted to get a loaf of soft, squishy stuff.  They said they don’t really eat it but took me to a bakery/coffee shop to get a loaf. While I bought something caller ‘Cereal Loaf’, Aline bought some Mango Lassis.  As we enjoyed our Lassis, Hemed arrived with a van to bring the mattress back to the house. He also had a bed frame with him.

When we got back to the house, Freddie arrived.  Freddie seems to be the guy who does everything.  Bit of a backtrack.  The property that Anke lives on has three houses for rent.  Anke’s is third back from the beach.  Each house comes with a staff house.  Anke doesn’t have staff (at least at the moment) but she sometimes hires the staff that work at the other houses.  Freddie lives in one of the staff houses.  I have no idea of who he works for, if anyone besides Anke. I have only been here a couple of days and Freddie has had quite a few projects in our house. The first of which was to put together my bed. 

After the beach walk and the mall visit, Anke and I unpacked the school supplies.  They filled a closet.  She was very excited to see everything. 

All of the school supplies that fit in my two bags filled a closet.

After that, things slowed down.  I tried to read a book but that just made me more tired  I didn’t want to go to bed so I lay down on the couch on the porch around 5pm.  I woke up at 7.  Just in time for fish dinner.  I lasted until 8:10 when I finally had to give up and go to bed. 

Yesterday morning I woke up at 4am.  I wrote my blog post and then spent most of the morning trying to make my computer work.  There was some deleting of programs and uploading of Google Chrome because Blogspot hates Explorer.  It works now, but it is still slow. 

I had a wonderful breakfast of yogurt and mango, coffee and cereal bread with cheese and jam. 

Yum.

When Anke and Aline got up, they also had some cereal bread and liked it. Even Freddie had some.  It was decided if the bread was this tasty, we needed a toaster.  Back to the mall that afternoon.

We found a toaster.  We also bought some more groceries including some dried fish because Anke had been planning to steal a kitten that is at Jipe Moyo.  I’m not sure if that is still the plan now that she is planning to adopt Lamu, the puppy (who, by the way, has left and run back to her siblings). 

Before we went shopping, we went to a wonderful park that is across from the mall.  It is called Haller Park and is an old quarry, filled and planted with natural habitat.  They also have a big enclosure with some ungulates and a couple of hippos. There are some giant tortoises sitting around and a giraffe enclosure that isn’t as nice as the hippo pond.  The poor giraffes have an unfortunate backdrop of a tire dump. People can buy peanuts for them though so they come right up to the fence when tourists arrive.  There are miles of walking trails and a tilapia fish farm (or research station?).  My favourite part was the fish tanks because there were two kingfishers that just kept diving into the fingerling tank and eating their fill.  It is amazing that any of the fish make it into the next phases.  Those Kingfishers (Pied) were gluttons.

Tortoises.  Here you are allowed to touch them

This crazy lizard

Monkeys everywhere.

More walkways

More monkeys

Gluttonous Pied Kingfisher, between courses

The buffet table for the Kingfisher

Walkways

Anke tricks a giraffe into visiting with an empty hand.
Where's my peanuts?  Says the giraffe before he turns away in disgust

Then to the mall and then home in Ramone's tuktuk.  We had taken a Matatu to the mall.  Matatus are little minivans/buses that seat 16 passengers.  In North America, they would seat 6. [By the way, for those keeping tabs, I keep breaking several ‘thou shalt not’ commandments of Kenyan travel.   Don’t touch the dogs (Travel Nurse).  Don’t take Matatus (Gov’t of Canada Travel Advisory).  Avoid sunburn and mosquito bites (common sense)].

We bought so much stuff, we had to get Ramone to bring us home in his tuktuk.  Aline had gone out with friends so Anke and I went to dinner at a hotel a few minutes down the beach.  We shared a pizza and a lemon and berry ice cream sundae.  Anke and I are getting along great.  She and Aline are treating me like I have always been here and that it isn’t odd that a complete stranger showed up and moved into their house.  Anke said it seems like she has known me much longer.  Since she is so nice and seems to like everyone, that may be normal for her.  But I feel the same, and since I am not nearly as nice or as friendly, that is saying something.  She may come and stay with me when she gets back to Canada.  Wait a minute, I just remembered the puppy (uh oh).

I owe Rhonda and Tara and James big time for introducing me to the Jenkins.

(Believe it or not, there is another trip to the mall being planned for this afternoon!)

Last night I managed to stay up until 8:15.  A gain of 5 minutes.  Plus I managed to sleep until 6am.  I woke up a 2am when the rain got serious and the power went out.  Normally that doesn’t matter at 2am but my fan turned off and the mosquitoes attacked.  I had to get up and dip myself in a vat of Raid.  

Toast and coffee for breakfast while I watched the rain bucket out of the sky and the thunder rumble across the heavens.

Anke is planning to take me to Jipe Moyo tomorrow to meet the kids.  It is her birthday tomorrow so we are taking cookies and milk for a birthday treat. That will be fun.  No worries, there will be pictures.

Update - Later that night: Lamu the puppy has not come back.  I'm not sure her adoption is a sure thing.  We went to the mall.  Just as we were leaving to catch a Matatu, it started to sprinkle.  By the time we got on the bus, it was raining.  When we were ready to leave the mall it was bucketing again. We had to call Ramone to save us.  Anke is very eager to get her car back. 

Bonus update:  That little blue bird was a Rose cheeked Cordon Bleu.  My first new bird.

How cute is he?  Very. 

It is 8pm and I am still up.  Progress.  But it is still raining hard so Jipe Moyo may have to wait until later in the week.  The roads will be a problem if it keeps raining through the night.