Briana's Travels

We had a productive, tiring, and really fun weekend! We spent Saturday basically doing errands. We basically walked across downtown Nairobi in the morning to go to a repair shop to try to fix a wireless modem (no luck), and we spent the afternoon at one of the local malls (the Sarit Center) getting a new wireless modem, going grocery shopping, etc. A view of a Nairobi street from a pedestrian bridge We walked by a large market downtown Someone has opinions about mangoes, which we eat most nights for dessert Sunday was the fun day. First we went to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Elephant Orphanage , where we got to pet baby elephants! I have been so excited to do this with Toby. We happened to be right near where the elephants walk to get to where they are fed bottles of milk and tree branches, so Toby got to touch one little one when it was walking in, and most of the group of 10 slightly older ones when they were done eating and left to forage in the bush for ...

We finished up our first full work week in Kenya today! We're finally getting into a good groove with morning and evening routines, and actually got to the museum at 9am today which is my goal. :) Speaking of the museum, I'm finally going to tell you a little more about my museum research here. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm studying fossils from the site of Olorgesailie in southern Kenya. The fossils I'm studying come from over a dozen excavations from a time horizon that's just under a million years old (992,000 years old, to be more precise). I've been studying these fossils for more than 10 years, because there's a lot of them to examine!! I have over 100,000 fossils in my database. Most of them are small and unidentifiable, but occasionally I find one that I can tell what kind of bone it is, and even what kind of animal it came from. My data collection set up: trays of fossils, a small laptop, bright lights, calipers to take measurements...