A day in Nairobi

Today we took a driving tour of Nairobi, including the Karen Blixen Museum and a stop at a shopping mall to get a few things.



Our guides for the day. Brad was our driver, a man from a small village 300 miles north of Nairobi who showed us around uptown and downtown, and made us feel safe in some areas tourists rarely visit. Sammy was our knowledgeable and friendly guide for a tour of the Karen Blixen Museum.









A few photos of the Karen Blixen Museum, which is near our cottage and located on the site of her coffee plantation. The inside of the house is spectacular, and decorated with ceiling high African Mahogany (just like our parlor at home!), but no photos were allowed inside the building.

After the museum, we drove to the Kobe Tough bead and leather facility, where we were greeted with some singing and dancing, then watched demonstrations of how they make their wares.









Photos from our tour of Kobe Tough.
Next was a drive through the uptown area, home to many government buildings and large businesses.





Uptown Nairobi
From uptown we crossed into downtown, which is more crowded, colorful, and dirty than uptown. Few tourists visit downtown, so we got stares at times, and people would walk right up to our van and say things like "hello white people" in Swahili. I had to be careful with my camera and phone, and a few guys walked close to me and looked in the window. We had several people tell our driver that he should roll up the windows for our safety, but we needed to get some photos!







Downtown Nairobi


Driving around downtown, there were many reminders that nobody in the US has anything to complain about.










Megan mentioned that she liked the highly decorated buses, so our driver Brad took us to an area where buses pick up passengers so that we could see many of them. Each bus sits still until it's full, then drives to its marked destination.



We saw several vans and buses adorned with Breaking Bad images. Great to see the Kenyan people embracing the best of American culture and entertainment.

The we went to the Galleria Shopping Mall for a few things. Galleria felt like a modern mall in the suburbs of a big US city, with numerous stores on multiple levels and several American fast-food outlets such as Pizza Hut and KFC.





Photos from the drive through the suburb of Karen to our cottage.
Then we went back to our rooms to relax, and for dinner we checked out the fancy white tablecloth restaurant at our resort. I had the roasted duck, and it was great.




Dinner and the walk back to our cottage.
Tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn, we'll be loading into a 4WD for our drive to Masai Mara National Reserve on the Tanzanian border, known for its lions, cheetahs, elephants, zebras and hippos. Time to get some sleep!