I opted to do my long run Saturday morning, because I figured between the late night of clubbing that night that Ross was gunning for and church festivities on Sunday getting in a run at all would be tough enough without trying to carve out over two hours. Nairobi was the opposite of Eldoret in that rather than looking forward to my long run so I could explore farther down the endless dirt roads I wondered about how much I would have to loop around to get in enough time. I did my standard route over to the sports ground, which was getting a little bit boring but it was still light years better than running around the estate so I didn't mind. It looked like they were setting up for a soccer tournament or something there, so there were more people than usual, almost all of them giving me curious glances. It was interesting to me that no one yelled at me, a couple quietly said hi when I greeted them and the rest just gave glances like they wanted to see what the heck I was doing but didn't want to be caught staring, a stark contrast to Eldoret. My guess is that people see whites enough in Nairobi that it's less of a spectacle than in Eldoret and more of just a curious oddity here. Just walking around in downtown Nairobi I feel like most people don't even give me a second look, or at least definitely don't stop and stare like they often do on my runs in Eldoret. Even for these people though, I would guess seeing a mzungu out running is something new, or at least something very odd. I planned to include my new dirt road through the factory area to the run but had a little bit of a scare with some pain in my foot as I headed that way, so I decided to turn for home. I think that's about the first pain I've experienced this summer and it's certainly not a coincidence that I felt coming back to pound the concrete streets of Nairobi after running on the dirt roads. It calmed down by the time I got back, so I explored the streets around the estate, none of which were decent for running. I thought I got a lot more surprised looks and it occurred to me that not only to these people rarely see mzungus but they probably barely see runners, simply because it's too crowded of an area for running. I got more familiar with the area around the estate though, and went on a couple roads I hadn't been on at all. For the amount of time I'd spent in Nairobi I think I was much more familiar with the areas around where I stayed in Eldoret and Kisumu, because running had proven to be my main mode of familiarization with the surrounding areas everywhere other than Nairobi.
Heather and Patrick had planned to do a big lunch at the house to kind of serve as the semi-official celebration of them getting married/them being there/the prodigal son returning home, and preparations were gearing up by the time I got back. The lawn chairs, table, and lawn umbrella were out in the yard and all of the girls were out there cutting mountains of vegetables as Patrick's dad sat with them and read the newspaper/supervised/actually just read the paper. Since they had arrived Heather, Patrick, Jordan, Marissa, and Melanie had been far more helpful with the housework than I had been in all my time there. As I saw it there were basically three reasons why I'd barely contributed to any housekeeping or cooking: I'm a visitor, I'm male, and I refuse to engage in polite arguments about whether I should help or not. Over the course of my time here there's been a number of times I've asked if there was anything I could do to help, which was consistently answered with what amounted to a polite request to stay out of the way. Maybe the girls were more insistent, but it seemed to me they were much more quickly welcomed into the kitchen to help. I realized that the cooking crew for this feast was completely female, and if staying out of the way was good enough for Patrick's dad, that would be good enough for me. If I was helping I wanted to make sure it was actually helpful rather than out of some misplaced sense of courtesy that I wanted to pull my wait that would actually only slow the process down. Ross commented later, as him and I were sitting around as the women cooked, that one of the perks of coming to Kenya was that very little in the way of helping with cooking and cleaning was expected of you as a male. Heather, however, was not from this system; on the contrary, she had been living in gender equality for all, power-to-the-women-let's-chain-our-men-to-the-stove-and-take-over-the-world Seattle for the last five or six years (note: let it be known that Heather is not one of the raging feminists that make the streets of Seattle dangerous to walk alone at night if you are indeed a male, but in my opinion even the slightest opportunity to take a jab at the Seattle feminist crowd must be seized with the utmost enthusiasm) so she asked me to crush the garlic. I enjoyed this because the garlic smell reminded me of Safeco Field, and I wistfully thought of how great it would be to go to a Mariners game right now. I'm not even sure how to explain my feeling of wanting to go home. It's not that I don't like Kenya or don't like having the time that I do here, but still I've been here and away from nearly everything that's been familiar to me for my whole life that whenever I'm reminded of it, I really can't wait to be back to the familiar sights and sounds and smells and people and culture.
As seems to happen more often than not, the meal that was supposed to be lunch at noon or one turned into an early dinner at five. This is baffling to my American perspective because I just can't see how you miscalculate how long it will take to get a meal ready by 5 hours, but that's just kind of how things happen here and I really don't want to complain because the food was phenomenal, and if they put me in the charge the meal would have been ready by one and it would have been a disgustingly large stack of fried egg sandwiches and a pile of hash browns that could rival the standard fare at Beth's. Plus, as is also usually the case, it was pretty fun hanging out and relaxing with the people there while we waited. Elijah and Tanna had come, and so had Nora, a girl who had lived with Jordan and Heather for a summer, and her brother, so it was a fun crowd to hang out with. Rainier Avenue is far enough away from SPU that during school I don't make it down there as often as I would like to, so I was happy to be able to hang out with everyone. It was kind of weird though to basically be hanging out with the whole crowd of Seattle people in Nairobi, but for me it was a welcome break from being different to completely fit in with the group. I pulled myself away after dinner to take a nap so I could head out clubbing with Ross and the girls. I was hesitant to leave because I was enjoying relaxing and talking with Americans for the first time in over a month, but these was a group of people I could talk with in Seattle and I thought clubbing with Ross in Nairobi could be a good cultural experience. I'd seen as much of Kenyan clubs as I cared to, but I thought going along with Ross would be a lot more fun than just going with the girls.
I think I've mentioned before the lack of privacy that often exists, but I don't think I've quite done the subject justice, and in this particular case it was worse than usual. As I've said, the size of Kenyan families and the size of Kenyan houses usually necessitates that all the boys share a room and all the girls share a room in a house. This inevitably means there can be a decent amount of traffic through the rooms, even while you're sleeping, but I haven't seen much regard for sleeping people in a room. People turn on the lights, talk in decidedly unhushed voices, play loud music, and don't hesitate to wake you up for anything and everything. Maybe this is just something that I'm pretty touchy about but I've been shocked at how much people trying to sleep are ignored, both me and others. In this case it meant that in the course of trying to take a three hour nap, people came in and turned the light on about eight times, I think three different people woke me up, two of those woke me up and tried to start conversations with me, and Flo couldn't figure out why I was grumpy when she woke me up to head out. If I was grumpy before we took off, the taxi ride that took over an hour because of running around to pick something up for Atieno with Flo and Atieno harassing me the whole way didn't help. We headed out to Westlands, a fairly class neighborhood with a decent number of whites, at least compared to other areas, and I saw as many white people in the clubs there as I think I'd seen anywhere other than camping up in Kaptagat. Ross and I hung out with a couple of his friends for a good portion of the night, and we headed around to a couple clubs. We started really hopping around 3, and by then I was definitely ready to head home, but as always the others were going strong until around 5. It had been an alright night, but I still wasn't hooked on clubbing at all. I liked dancing around and hanging out, but to me about two hours of that was enough, and the standard here, at least with the people I've gone with, is to head out for at least six or seven hours, which is well past when I'm wishing we could go home. I'm pretty sure I'm done with clubbing, because I kind of figure if I don't have that much fun clubbing with Ross in Nairobi, then there's not really any point in going any more.
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