Nairobi, weekend five (july 10 to 11):

my second to last weekend in kenya was spent relaxing in nairobi, or rather, galavanting around nairobi hanging out with people from work as well as with random ex-pats and crazy football fans

following a late arousal from bed saturday morning, we went to a fundraiser for the building of a library in a town on the uganda/kenya border (that we had heard about the previous night from some other upperhill residents); after meeting a local kenya author, a university student, and a kenyan MP (high government official), we went to pascal's apartment on the outskirts of nairobi to enjoy an evening of football (germany vs. uruguay) and ugali and sauce (like to and sauce from burkina, and the rest of africa); we also spent the night there after conversing about america, kenya, and music (i introduced pascal to bluegrass, and he gave me his collection of krunk)

as full as saturday may have been, i ended up filling sunday with even more (even in kenya, i can't resist packing my schedule to the brim); in the morning we met another guy from APDK who took us to his church where we heard a sermon by brother william branham (one pre-service message from recording by branham, a second written by branham, but delivered by the church's pastor), let's just say the "end-of times worship center" was quite a different experience (from imagined african and american), with much enthusiasm and many challenging ideas ... we then met a couple other MIT grad students and a couple students from the university of nairobi for lunch to discuss american universities and how the nairobi students could get hooked up with summer work or other projects there; during lunch i also learned about an ex-pat ultimate frisbee game on sunday afternoons, which, of course, i had to attend; so after about 3 hours of good quality pick-up ultimate (on some super nice grass fields at the private international school/university), i went to a local bar/club to watch the world cup final; there we plenty of ex-pats cheering for spain or netherlands, as well as many locals joining in the world cup fever; despite a non-ideal job of refereeing, the game was rather entertaining, with many cries of dismay from both groups of supporters; though neither team had won a world cup before, i was supporting spain, so the goal in the last 5 minutes of overtime was a relief; however, the enormous roar that erupted when the goal was scored was still more entertaining! after waiting almost 2 hours for a goal, the place went absolutely nuts, with the screams and waving arms of the spanish fans hiding the disappointed faces of the danes ... not quite the same, but probably about as close as i'll get to watching a world cup game in person