A Day of Rest

---

Today is everyone’s day of rest and a day to spend with family. I planned yesterday to attend church with Frank this morning at 9:30 am since poor Nicole is still working through until tomorrow. Still no baby! I find it a little bit frustrating with the phone system here, or rather lack of. Everyone and their brother has a cell phone since they are very cheap to buy and it’s the only way to communicate in Kibera since there are no land lines. Frank’s phone has seen better days - on the better days you can be assured at least 3 attempts between dropped calls and busy signals. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get through to him on time for church, but tried him throughout the morning and invited him to go out for the afternoon. I felt a little selfish doing this especially since I knew he was at another church outside of Kibera with friends he hadn’t seen in some time. It’s no fun doing touristy things by yourself though!

So off we went with Johnson to the Giraffe Centre and Karen Blixen’s House. Both of these attractions are in a suburb within Nairobi City Limits called Karen. It’s a more affluent part of town with a very lush landscape and lots of open, green space. I read about the Giraffe Centre prior to leaving for Nairobi and wanted to go there for sure if time permitted. It was well worth it! Rothschild’s Giraffes roam freely around an estate and I had the opportunity to feed them and pet them. They are such gorgeous creatures. As you’ll see from one of the photos (that I’m not particularly proud of), you’ll see they have very long tongues…I took comfort in the fact that their saliva has antiseptic qualities and figured if I had a cut on my face (which I didn’t) that it might help it heal faster!

Sticking a piece of food in your mouth which I did for this giraffe kiss was a complete dare…normally I wouldn’t do these things, but the deal was if Frank did it, I would have to do it too! And after several other girls and I taunting him that he was a girly-man if he didn’t do it, he reluctantly did it! It’s amazing what peer pressure will do. Unfortunately I have no photo - just the video version.


One of the other photos shows the estate home itself which people can book into - I believe there are only 7 rooms and it’s quite a pricey venture, but you can expect to have breakfast in the sunroom with the giraffes sticking their heads through for a bite to eat. The little dots on the grass are warthogs of which there were quite a few. There were also ancient looking tortoises casually eating their cabbage lunch. Kate, you would have loved it and I wish you had of been with me…!

Johnson then took us over to Karen Blixen’s House. Karen Blixen wrote “Out of Africa” and the house it the estate that she lived in when she lived in Kenya back in the 1940s and ‘50s. It was a truly gorgeous place and interesting to see. The contents of the home were either the original pieces from when she lived there or the props that Meryl Streep and Robert Redford used/wore during the taping of the movie. The tour guide asked me if we had any such thing as a dowry arrangement in Canada when people get married. He was disappointed when he found out we didn’t as this sort of thing is alive and well all over Africa. I did find out that my dowry would be at least 20 cows and 100 goats - I was very flattered by this, but I have no idea where mom and dad would have put these 120 animals!

Frank, like myself had never been to either of these places and we had a great time. We picked Nicole up from work on the way home and caught her up on all the day's events.

---