Holiday Greetings!

My next destination...

Cape Town! The Mother City of South Africa and one of the perfect places in this world. I will bring in the New Year atop Table Mountain and spend a few days touring wine country, hearing amazing jazz and just generally chilling with some of the most laid back people in the world.

Mt. Kilimanjaro

Sadly this is a poor picture taken from aloft and as close as I have been to Mt. Kilimanjaro. Sadder still is the fact that meteorological predictions say that within twenty years all the snows
of Kilimanjaro will be gone... so you best get here soon. (Mt. Kenya is another site to see and a picture of that to come soon too.)

Ravine Gardens, and at work

This is the wall and buildings at my apartment complex. Mine is the apartment in the upper right hand corner. I have since added more plants and the patio is much nicer; where I spend mornings, in my hideous African robe sipping coffee while my neighbours scurry off to work. Since my office is in my apartment (much to the consternation of my neighbours) I get to enjoy the morning a little more while they usually have to fight the rush-hour traffic. Traffic is awful here, drivers are aggressive and the roads are more troublesome than they are hazardous, but more on that later. That's me at my desk, an older one replaced when I moved into my permanent residence, but that's just to let you now that all my time isn't spent swanning around the Continent, just a fair amount of it.

Places Brad has been...

Road-side shops: while there are modern stores (Woolworth's lives on here in Africa, more like a US department store, than the old 5&Dime we remember) average Kenyans shop at the road-side for their daily produce and bread (also cigarettes, haircuts, electricians, and what ever someone may need on a day-to-day basis. Funnily enough each store tends to sell the same things and the row of shops differ from place to place. One grouping will sell shoes, another clothes and another hardware.

Coffee, please!

One great advantage of being in Kenya is that
this is a serious coffee culture. And the coffee here is good. They love their coffee and take great pride in its quality.











Oddly enough though Kenya's flower industry is quickly growing and is now their third largest profit crop, coffee being #2 and tea #1 (this is a former British colony after all.) Tourism is the #4 money maker here.

Brad sighting!

Brad's been spotted!
Somewhere in the lovely Nairobi skyline...



Africa isn't all mud huts and poverty. Nairobi, like many cities on the Dark Continent is a big, bustling, wealthy, city, with modern infrastructure (okay not always that modern, power outages are frequent) and conveniences. They are also rife with advertising, the Tusker Building picture is my artistic attempt to show the reflection of a huge ad that's reflecting in a glass front building in downtown Nairobi. They do like their advertise- ments BIG here. (And the moniker 'Dark Continent' is more a reflection of the general ignorance about the place than the place itself.) And a note for the oddities that can crop up here, Nairobi just opened the third skating rink in Africa - watch CNN this weekend for a story about it, and you just may see me skating around, barely better than the Kenyans.

The World is waiting...

To know, where is Bradley? Rumor has it, he may have recently been spotted in Nairobi. Uncertain if he was seen with men in gorilla suits, traveling in groups of three. Percussion optional.
Play Me