Last night in Cardiff

Well today's our last day in Cardiff and it's already been quite a rainy one. We take the bus to London's Heathrow airport this afternoon to catch an 7:15 pm flight to Nairobi, where we'll arrive tomorrow at 6 am Kenyan time.

We had a great week here in Cardiff, with a visit from Miranda and making some new friends at the hostel and getting to meet many of Muya's Kenyan friends. On Thursday night, one of his friends named Patrick (pictured on the far left in the picture above) let us into the student laundry facility so that we could have clean clothing for our trip to Kenya. We enjoyed a few pints at the Woodville Pub while we waited for the wash to finish and enjoyed more conversations about different cultures.

We had most of the day off on Friday so that we could make our final preparations for our travels today and took advantage of the free time to see a movie. This may have been the most bizarre movie experience of my life, though in retrospect it wasn't THAT crazy. We were the only people in the theatre, to see Bridge to Terabithia (which is a major tear-jerker, in case you were wondering), and only two other people arrived before the show. There were no ads or funny quizzes to watch, like there are in the States, and the movie began after only 2 or 3 previews. The movie began and the image was distorted so that all the people looked like fat midgets throughout the entire thing. No one (including me) bothered to do anything about it... we could still get the main idea of what was going on. At the end of the movie, the credits ran for about 2 1/2 seconds and then the screen went black and the lights came up. It was very strange. So the movie was good, despite some peculiarities with how it was displayed. Could this be how all the movies in Cardiff are run? Who knows.

For our last night here, we joined Muya and his lab mates at an Iranian restaurant called "Topoli" where we enjoyed BYO wine and some delicious naan that they cooked in the stone oven oven that was right next to our table. The food was definitely a new experience for me but was very delicious, despite the fact that cheese was virtually absent from the meals. The wild garlic and yogurt dish was one of my favorites.

After dinner we headed out to get a few more pints with Muya and his roommate, Dorkas, at another pub called "Social." We met our new friend Patrick there and also got to meet a few other East African Cardiff residents and enjoyed hearing more about Kenya and all that we have to look forward to there.

We're off to the bus station in a few more minutes, so I'm not sure when the next entry will come - we'll see what our internet access is like once we arrive in Kenya tomorrow.

Kenya, here we come!

~Corynne