Not Much Going On

Not much has been going on here. Monday evening we walked down the road to another hotel for dinner. The road is dirt and there is a lot of mucky water and garbage on the sides of the road. There are also an awful lot of half-built buildings around here. I wonder what the deal is with that. Dinner was pretty good - we all had Indian food. We sat outside which wasn't the best idea. Bugs kept flying into our meals. We saw some cats, I looked them up, they are African wild cats. They look like regular house cats but they have different markings.

When we ordered our drinks at dinner, Jason and I ordered a bottle of water to share. The water came and the guy poured us each a glass and I took a couple of drinks. Then, a few minutes later when the server came back to take our order, Jason asked if we could have another water. I asked why and he pointed out to me that the label on the water seemed to be pasted over another label and on the side someone had hand-written 1.5 liters. The picture is kind of blurry but if you look closely, you can see the hand-written 1.5 liters. I'm glad he noticed this but was worried because I already drank some of it. Everyone at the table assured me it was probably boiled water in a re-used bottle. We're not sure why they brought us that instead of the regular brand of water we've come to expect. I seem to be OK though. I need to be more diligent about checking the water.

Jason has been busy working he was up until midnight last night working on some issue they are having with the database. I think he got it worked out. The internet connection here is very good but we've both been having problems uploading some things.

Jason said that in town he saw these huge storks digging through the garbage. He said there were also people digging through the garbage and the storks were as big as the people - it was freaky. He looked it up online to show me - they are called Marabou Storks.

Because I've been hanging around the hotel all day, I'm getting to know the people who work here. I already told you about Fiona, the manager. There is also Bonifant - he works in the restaurant and he taught us how to say "What's up?" in Swahili (Mambo) and the response which is "I'm cool" (Poa). Fatuma cleans the room each day and there is one other woman I talk to every day in the restaurant and I can't think of her name at the moment...

This morning at breakfast one of the guests started playing piano and the young woman (I wish I could remember her name!) sang a song - that was really nice.

Here are some pictures of the area outside of our hotel room. You can see the guard tower in the background of this one. It is very green around the hotel. On both sides there are gardens and people work in them almost all day. I asked who the people were and if the gardens were for the hotel. Bonifant told me that the people who work in the gardens are villagers and they sell the vegetables at the market every day.

There also seems to be a lot of farm animals around here. There is a rooster (maybe multiple roosters, I'm not sure) that does his little rooster call all day long. There also seems to be a sheep or goat or something nearby that bleats all day long - bleaat...bleaat...bleaat.

I think there are literally millions of different frogs around here - at night you can hear all sorts of croaking. It is far from quiet.





Nothing much else going on. Today is another work day. It looks like it is going to be another beautiful day too. It is in the 60's right now and breezy. There have been passing thunder showers every afternoon.

Jason might be finished working tomorrow. If that is the case then I'm going to see if we can arrange to go to the Bujora Cultural Center on Friday.

I'll post again if anything interesting happens before our Safari which begins on Saturday.