Adventures in Onionism

I forgot to post about the Hairy Lemon. The weekend before I went to the US, a few friends and I went to a little slice of heaven known as the Hairy Lemon. It's 40km outside Jinja on an island in the Nile River. I rode my motorcycle and my friend S took matatus and we stayed with friends in Busia Friday night. Saturday morning, after picking my bike up from the shop in Busia that I trust (I don't quite have the connections in Kakamega yet) we headed to Jinja separately, me on the bike and him in a matatu (I got there in basically half the time.) While waiting I met a German dude named Stephan who rode his bike all the way from (duh) Germany. To be exact he no longer had an unbroken trail because he'd tried taking a westerly route and had hoped to cross to East Africa through CAR and the Congo, but decided against it since he didn't want to die quite yet. He's headed to Capetown, of course. He was very cool. I'd link you to a website, but he doesn't have one

Here's my motorcycle plan for the weekend. Remember this post about Rory Stewart's book on his walk across Afghanistan from 5 years ago when I was in Kenya the first time? I thought not. But I read a interesting New Yorker article about him today. Surprise, he's now a politician and likes to compare himself to Alexander the Great. Sorry it's gated.

Good news everyone, the quarter-inch long piece of sea urchin that's been stuck in my foot since Christmas came out. Also, I went white-water rafting on the Nile near Jinja, Uganda. I'd never been rafting before since I refused to go during sissy family reunion opportunities. I'd been jealous of a few river-rat acquaintances that spent summers guiding on the Colorado, but after finally going, all I have to say is "eh." Don't get me wrong, I had a ton of fun, but Lonely Planet calls this "one of the most spectacular white-water rafting destinations in the world," we did several class five rapids, and we flipped a bunch of times, but it was never even remotely scary. I'm not saying that I'm a total bad-ass and nothing scares me, because I get scared all the time crossing steep icy slopes above long drop-offs, being exposed during lightning storms, or getting extremely wet and cold in snowstorms, but I'm a pretty poor swimmer and yet this wa