Nothing Much

What have I been up to for the past week and half? Mostly eating turkey sandwiches. I finally let Jimmy the parking-lot dog finish it off on Saturday.

After killing a turkey I decided to plant a vegetable garden. Here's Hezborn, one of the guards at our house, standing in front of the garden he helped me plant.

So far ants have only destroyed 1/8 of the rows, and the fence is still keeping the chickens out, so we're doing OK.

Here's my patheticly wussy hands after a couple hours with a hoe, and my feet after months of Chacos. Yes, most of that is clearly just dirt, but it's impressive even when I'm clean.

After struggling through life without a toaster for a week (the old one tried to kill us so we threw it away) I went to Kisumu to get a new one. I also bought fun stuff like real Heinz ketchup (as opposed to the cocktail sauce-esque stuff they normally have here), fake Nutella, soy sauce, and some books. I am totally mad that I didn't look for powdered sugar.

Where did I do all this glorious shopping? Nakumatt City, that's where. It's almost the same as an American Wal-mart, only the parking lot has only 20 spaces, the shelves were full but the items were only stacked 1-deep, and the place sparkled like a Stepford wife's kitchen. And if it weren't for the theft-deterring employee placed every 10 meters inside every store large enough to actually enter (as opposed to just stand out front of and point to stuff inside) the place would've been empty. In the same building was a movie theater, complete with plush stadium seating. I paid my 250 shillings and was literally the only person in the theater for most of the movie (Children of Men--I think it's British, so I got to see it before it came out in the US). If I didn't hate the word "surreal" so much, I'd say it was a very surreal experience to be using a shopping cart and credit card and eating a Mars ice-cream bar.