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A Kenyan taxi adventure

Whoops, has it really been about 3 weeks since I wrote a post? I've just been working on fossils in the museum, nothing too exciting to report. Except that I have almost 55,000 fossils in my database. That's a *lot* of broken bits of bone. :)

On the recommendation of a colleague who lives here, I found a great OB and had an appointment with her last week. She was very thorough and friendly. The next day I went for my gestational diabetes test (standard at this point in pregnancy - 25 weeks down, 15 to go!), which came back negative. Then the day after that I had a sonogram, as advice from the home docs was to have one every month of possible. (I have uterine fibroids and they just want to make sure the baby's not too crowded in there.) Sonograms are great - getting to see your baby moving around, hear that everything is normal (breathe a big sigh of relief), and getting to see a glimpse of what they actually look like.


The doc remarked on his "prominent nose" (seen better in profile), which is more likely to come from Peter's side of the family, but so far consensus is that he has my nose in this picture.

Anyway, it's hard not to focus on the baby - a colleague of mine from back home (Nancy) has her 10 month old son here, so I've been peppering her with questions about kid-in-Kenya logistics, and she's been great!

Tomorrow morning another adventure begins; it's time to go to the field! My U.K.colleagues Fire and Nick arrived this morning; they're upstairs sleeping off the overnight flight from London, but I'll be waking them up soon to shower and head off for lunch, shopping and errands. Speaking of adventures, here's a great Kenya cab adventure they had this morning....

I arranged for a taxi to pick them up at the airport for their 6:30 am arrival. I gave the taxi driver their names to make a sign, and gave them his phone number in case they couldn't find him. Well, Fire's legal name is Kris, and she saw a taxi driver holding sign for "Kris" when they exited the arrivals area, so she  assumed this was the guy. They put their bags in his car, and the taxi driver gave them some Kenyan shillings for their breakfast (which they thought was odd, since the arrangement was for them to come to the flat where I'm staying so they could nap and shower, then we'd go off for lunch etc.) The driver said "Yes, this is the money Bernice said to give you for breakfast at Java House, where we'll go directly from here." Quizzical looks."You mean, Briana?" "No, Bernice." At this point, they realized... they were in the wrong taxi! They managed to find the right taxi driver (who was holding a sign for Fire and Nick), but we don't know if the first taxi driver managed to find his passengers. Anyway, I was relieved when Fire sent me a text letting me know that she and Nick were in the taxi on their way, and that she had a great taxi story for me. Fire has been here before, but it's Nick's first visit to the African continent, so I think they're both a little nervous for him. So far, so good. Welcome to Kenya!

I am going to make an effort to post more often from the field - I think there'll be more photos and stories to share once we're up there.

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