Stuff You See if you are Looking

Caught red handed on our balcony
 Eating our flowers!

We were hanging out at the apartment one Saturday afternoon and a troop of monkeys rolled in.  They are quite a wild card in these parts - you never know where or when they will show up.  They range wherever they want and can appear very unexpectedly.  Keep in mind that our apartment is on the 5th floor, that is 4 flights of steps up from the ground.  For us that always makes our homecomings seem like such an excited and breathless reunion.  For these guys it is nothing to climb up the side of the building and be looking in our window.

One day last week I just missed it at work but Kimberley saw it happen.  Since there is no heating or air conditioning in the office it is common for all the doors and windows to be open.  Out of nowhere a bigger monkey than these little guys runs in the back door,  through the front lobby and into the center courtyard of the building.  He then promptly made a beeline for the library - always one of the busiest rooms in the place.  He proceeded to sow some chaos in there.  The really odd thing to me out of this was I expected this to be the talk of the building the next day - but not one word was heard.  I guess it is just not that unusual.

More Coke

Lots of odd buildings scattered about

A little unusual but not unheard of is exemplified by this photo. Here we have a normal 2 way street with cars and trucks occupying both lanes in the same direction.  Were there cars across the intersection lined up to go down the road on the side the Repent truck is on?  yes.  Did this create gridlock at the intersection because no one could get out of each others way?  yes.  Were people ticked and talking to each other through their windows about how silly this was?  of course.  

The traffic is so bad here that there is a whole industry of people selling literally anything to the people stuck in the jams.  They just take their time walking up and down the lanes of traffic that are not moving, offering whatever they can carry to drivers or passengers.  In one jam we could have actually bought enough veggies to have cooked a good supper.

Little Lunch Clubs pop up just about anywhere

We went into a roadside gift shop in Karen (an upscale residential area on the west side) and the place was full of carvings of all sizes.  I could have bought a life sized water buffalo reclining on the floor like a minor mahogany mountain.  Naturally my first impulse was to look on the bottoms for tiny made in china stickers but to no avail.  I asked the proprietor - when he finished reassuring me that he could ship the buffalo to the states for me - where he got all these carvings.  He just pointed to the back door.  Curiously I wandered in that direction and I popped into this tiny workshop with 2 men carving away. I left without a buffalo but very impressed. 

We came across this charity walk  and there was at least a mile straight of participants.  There was also a half marathon this past weekend that Kimberley ran in and impressively she finished in about an hour 48 with no training or prep for it.  she said the leaders were returning when she was about a third into the course.  This being Kenya, and expected to dominate the Olympic marathon soon, I will not be surprised if she sees some of them again on TV.

You never know what the traffic will be like

Corn Vendor!!!

Corn eating is very big here.  The vendors grill it, usually over a stone bowl of some kind full of home made charcoal. As you drive by they are often fanning the coals with a piece of paper while they await the next customer.  You can tell that a stand is in the area when you are walking along the street because there are cobs discarded on the ground everywhere.  Since there is normally a vendor every few blocks just about anywhere you go will be liberally scattered with them, adding a natural touch to the variety of man made litter provided in generous quantities.  No street sweepers here.