Weekend Adventures

Friday night was Milanne's birthday celebration. Her birthday was on Tuesday, but we went into Nairobi in an area called Westlands on Friday to have a proper dinner and party. Westlands is a very white area of Nairobi and the Westgate Mall made me feel like I was in Vegas or some shiny, commercialized city. It was kind of nice to step into such a clean and familiar place for a night.

We ate out on the patio of a restaurant called Art Caffe. The downside of being in such a developed area was that our view was a paved parking lot. But we arrived at dusk, so it didn't really matter. Once the wine started flowing, it mattered even less.

We enjoyed a long evening of amazing food - pizza, pasta, salad, and several desserts. We were joined with some of Josh's friends who also work or volunteer in Kenya (2 from Australia and 2 from the US). Deb, Milanne, and I headed back around 1am while Josh and Katie headed to another bar in Nairobi with the others.

I'll skip over Saturday as I didn't even get out of my pajamas.

Today, we headed south of Kitengela to the Maasai Ostrich Farm. It was a little disappointing, but still a great afternoon. We read online there were ostrich races on Sundays - I had this image in my head of a racetrack with people betting and cheering, but with ostriches instead of horses. Turns out, this is only sort of true. There are races, though not all the time, so we didn't get to see any today. There are 4 professional ostrich jockeys at the farm. But really, it was just a farm.

There were 1,200 ostriches at the farm, some as young as 1 month. At that age, they're about the size of a duck. They grow like crazy and by 4 months, their heads are above our own. The full grown ones were massive and slightly terrifying. I didn't trust any of them. It was something about their quick movements and long windy necks that could jut out towards me at any moment that made me uneasy. Their knees bend the opposite way of human knees, with the kneecap (if they actually even have kneecaps) on the back of the leg. When they run, it looks like a human running backwards. Ostriches are, hands down, the strangest looking animals I've ever seen.

They are only able to tell the males from the females at 3 years old because that's when their feathers change colours. Males are black and females are grey. We held some ostrich eggs - one egg can feed the equivalent of 20 chicken eggs, and they need to been cracked open with a hammer. An ostrich will lay an egg every morning for about 40 days, then stop for a period of time (not sure how long) then do it all over again. At the farm, they have to send a team of people in to distract the ostriches while another team go an steal the eggs and bring them to the hatchery. It's pretty dangerous, because if the ostriches see, they'll attack. And they can stomp people to death.

Once the tour of the farm was over, we headed to the restaurant for, what else?, an ostrich burger! It was quite good except I had to keep telling myself it's just like a giant chicken to avoid thinking about how weird it was that I was eating ostrich meat. Then it was ride time. Katie was the only one who met the weight restriction of 65 kgs so she got to ride an ostrich inside a pen. There was lots of squealing and "oh my god"'s on her end and a lot of laughing on ours. Justine managed to sneak in a ride too while the rest of us sat and watched... and laughed some more.