Because of the late night the night before I decided to wake up later for my run and see just how hazardous it would be. It turned out it actually wasn't all that much more crowded at 8:00 in the morning than at 6:00. Maybe I was waking up earlier just to run into the morning commute. By now I was comfortable enough with my running route to explore a little bit. Thinking about it now I had only run the route twice, but it felt familiar now and I was ready to see if there was elsewhere that would be good to run. It was definitely more adventurous than I would have been my first time in Nairobi, but I was much more comfortable exploring now after my successful excursions elsewhere. Kenya in general was becoming less strange and more familiar, maybe even to a somewhat dangerous degree. I felt that was part of why I had come. I hope that if I come back, Kenya won't be a strange foreign land, but a place I feel comfortable and even kind of "at home". I explored a little farther along the rim road and headed down a dirt road that looked like it headed toward some factories. As far as the Nairobi area goes it looked like a somewhat remote area and I was definitely kind of nervous about heading that way, but buoyed by all the successful running experiences I'd had so far. It turned out to be much less isolated than I thought, following the train tracks and, after passing a couple of factories it opened into a big field I recognized as being the one parallel to the road I had run the last couple of days. People dotted the whole field, which was pretty barren except for a couple of scraggly bushes. Already the area seemed much less sketchy than it first looked. I wondered if my adventurous running was going to catch up with me eventually, but it had provided me with so many great experiences and allowed me to see so much more of the places I was staying that I was glad I'd explored as much as I had.
I headed into town with Ross and Flo, and on the way in Ross pointed out areas we could explore later if we had time. If I was adventurous then Ross was fearless, because some of the streets he was pointing out I don't think I'd be bold enough to go down unless there was a pretty good reason or I was with someone who knew the area well. We passed one of the bigger slums in Nairobi, and I have to say it was an impressive sight. Where you could look out over it was almost non-stop corrugated metal roofs with few gaps for streets. Where the slum came up to the road you could see how incredibly crowded things were. The gaps between the shacks that people walked through looked to me like you would have to go sideways to make it through. The biggest slum in Nairobi was out on the way to Eddie's house and we had seen it from a distance the night before. Ross had told me that they could actually be pretty vibrant, and that he had walked through the big one with Miriam when he had been here before (all the slums have names, but I can't remember any of them). This was a strange concept to me because I'd thought of the slums the very top place to make sure I stayed away from. I'd never even slightly considered going into a slum, and considered them extremely dangerous. To hear that Ross and Miriam and walked through one just to check it out seemed strange to me, but in expressing this to Ross I found that, at least according to him, they aren't all that dangerous. You still definitely need to be careful, but they're not the "no fly zone" that I had made them out to be. That is now one of the things I want to be sure to do while I'm here since that was such a strong misconception in my mind. I can't imagine that I wouldn't learn a lot by walking through one of those areas.
Ross made for a much better tour guide than Flo, and it was good to be walking around with someone who both knew the city a little bit and also wanted to see the things and do similar shopping to what I wanted to do. I was able to finally get some money from the bank in Missoula out of an ATM, which was really a relief. That had been a pretty annoying, stressful thing and I was glad to be able to pay for things myself again. Ross and I negotiated a trip to get Kenyan national soccer team jerseys with Flo in return for a trip to the hair salon. We were able to get the jerseys for 1000 schillings, so about $11. I'm pretty sure getting a jersey of equivalent quality in the US would be at least $40-50. Rather than football (American), baseball, and basketball jerseys, the main jerseys for sale here were from European soccer teams and national rugby teams. I think I could spend myself broke on rugby jerseys, partly because they're pretty classy because they're basically polos that are made for sports and partly because they're just different from anything I've seen before and I think they're awesome. I stopped at a street vendor that I saw had a scarf for Gor Mahia, a popular local team in the Kenyan Premier League. I had thought about getting a Kenyan national scarf, but since I had the jersey I figured it would be cool to have a scarf from a local team. After some bargaining I got it for 300 schillings (a little over $3). I thought of the Sounders scarves back home that I believe go for about $30.
Ross left to go visit a friend, so it was back to me and Flo. We ate lunch, and then made a couple of long stops at different shops for Flo to get a CD burned, and she got a big kick out of me breaking one of the rickety stools at one of the places where we stopped. While we were waiting on the street for one of Flo's friends I headed across the street to the grocery store there to get some water and a snack, to Flo's distress/anger/worry. If worse came to worst I was pretty sure I could make it home and I was getting tired of following Flo around. Maybe it was just the little bit of hanging out with Ross that did it, but all of a sudden was pretty impatient about running errands around town with Flo. I guess I realized talking with Ross that I hadn't seen as much of the city as I had thought and was now antsy to do less just walking around with Flo and her friends and more seeing the cool stuff around Nairobi. Flo and I headed to a club to meet a couple of her friends while we waited for Heather and Patrick to come into town, which was actually pretty chill because I could just watch soccer on the TV's there while they talked. What wasn't pretty chill was when we took off and they started window shopping for perfume and beauty products. I felt like a boyfriend who was putting in his time, except that I wasn't a boyfriend and I knew there would be no tradeoff of heading on a hunting trip or something over the weekend, so I was pretty glum. When they came out of the shop I asked Flo where Heather and Patrick were and she said they still weren't in town. Serendipitously Heather and Patrick happened to walk up just then with Marissa, Melanie, and Jordan, their friends from church who they had just picked up from the airport. It was a huge relief to be able to take off with them and leave Flo and her friends to do whatever they wanted. I was in a pretty foul mood by that point, but I was happy to be back with Heather and Patrick and their crowd.
We all headed out toward Westlands, one of the nicer areas of Nairobi, to meet Elijah and Tanna for dinner. The traffic was as bad as I've seen it, and we opted to get out and walk the last stretch, as traffic was at an absolute stand still. As crazy as the traffic has been I think I've avoided the worst of it because I generally I haven't been coming in and out of town during rush hour. We met Elijah and Tanna at the house of Wawa's (another guy from Rainier Avenue) parents. Wawa's mom is white and has lived in Kenya for most of her life, which was interesting to me because for whatever reason an American living their whole life in Kenya still strikes me as peculiar. Maybe it's just that I couldn't picture myself doing it so it fascinates me that they are willing to. I think I'm actually less willing now to live long-term in Kenya than before I came. It's not that I haven't enjoyed Kenya; I've really enjoyed it and there have been a number of places that I've thought would be pretty cool to live, but in my time here all the fun I've had has been with the underlying feeling that I'll also be happy to get home.
We piled into a couple taxis and headed out to an Ethiopian restaurant out in that area and, as I was the only one other than Miriam who wasn't dealing with jet lag, it was kind of entertaining to watch people nodding off or fighting sleep during dinner. I think because of that the conversation wasn't too lively, but it was still fun hanging out with all those guys. Even in Seattle I'm not able to hang out with that group as much I'd like because with school and running (particularly running) making the trek down to Rainier Ave for church on Sundays (let alone during the week) is a pretty arduous task that I don't undertake all that often. They are a really fun group, even when none of them have slept much in the last 24 hours. About 5 minutes into the taxi ride home I think I was the only one awake, and I nodded off myself.
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