Wordpress Sucks!

Sorry to make you come to a new site for my blog but my other blog on wordpress hasn't been allowing me post pictures or any significant amount of text since I got to Mombasa ... so we'll be shifting over to this blog for a while. I'll find a more permanent solution later, in the meantime start checking this blog (cstoehr.blogspot.com) and you can ignore my original blog (cstoehr.wordpress.com) until further notice. For those of you who are subscribed to my wordpress blog I will try and put up a small post on that site letting you know when I have added content to this blog but I don't know if I will always be able to do that as Wordpress has been very unreliable lately...

BTW the picture at the top of this page is the view from my hotel room ... pretty awesome! :)

Below are the posts I have been trying (and failing miserably) to put up onto wordpress for the past couple days:

Indian Ocean Beach Soccer

I am staying in a very nice tourist resort on the north coast of Mombasa, for those of you who are interested in checking out the hotel here is their website: http://www.sarovahotels.com/whitesands

I was sitting by one of the many pools on Friday morning when hotel staff came by blowing a whistle and shouting out that they were organizing a game of beach soccer. Even though I had been out quite late the night before there was no way I was going to miss that so I bounded down to the beach following the other interested hotel patrons. Once everyone was gathered on the beach it became apparent that we were divided into four groups. There was a group of Welsh tourists, a group of Italian tourists, the Kenya hotel staff, and the final group consisted of ... me. We broke into two teams and I ended up on the Welsh team, although had we divided ourselves according to chest hair quantity I would have ended up on the Italian team, although it occurs to me that my bathing suit was not nearly small enough to be on the Italian side :)

As you can see in the pictures the beach here is beautiful, the water is VERY warm and the water line fluctuates by well over a hundred yards depending on the tides throughout the day. Low tide occurs in the morning which gave us plenty of beach to use for our game. The game got a bit more intense than I was expecting from a friendly beach soccer game. There were slide tackles and many people limping around following hard tackles. I played a bit more passively than the other players and managed to escape injury free :) Even tho my first priority was walking away in one piece I still managed to hand out a few assists and to score a goal. Throughout it was wonderful to hear the shouts coming from the various players in numerous languages. Swahili, Italian, and the heavily accented english of the Welsh floated through the air and I occasionally injected a bit of American english and the occasional "Sawa Sawa!" (Swahili for: Ok Ok) After playing for a while we broke for some rest. The Welsh and I had won 3 to 2 :)

After the break the Italians were still full of energy but the Welsh, happy with their victory, were content to retire to their lounge chairs near a pool.  We quickly gathered a group of Beach Boys (Young Kenyan men who pedal goods to the tourists along the beach) and resumed the game. It was the Beach Boys and myself vs. the Italians. After another passionate game my team emerged victorious once again! I think the aerodynamic drag caused by the Italians copious amounts of chest hair may have given my chest-hairless Kenyan teammates an unfair advantage :p  What I found most interesting throughout the game was how the impoverished Beach Boys easily switched back and forth from Italian, Swahili, and English depending on who they were talking to. They also did not let the soccer game get in their way when I came to hitting on any attractive female tourists that were passing by :)

It was an all around wonderful morning. Playing beach soccer next to the gorgeous Indian Ocean as the occasional camel wandered through our game is an event I will not soon forget! If I don't do a single other interesting thing while I am in Mombasa (highly unlikely) that soccer game will have made the whole trip worthwhile anyway.

I made it to Mombasa

I'm writing this as I sit in Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi waiting for my flight to Mombasa. Since I have a little while before my flight boards I thought I would take the time to jot down some if the little interesting quirks I am noticing about domestic air travel in Kenya.

1. I am flying on an airline called Fly540 which from what I understand is Kenya's version of Southwest Airlines. My flight to Mombasa which will take about 45 minutes cost me $55 USD which I thought was very reasonable. The same flight on Kenya Airways costs over $200 USD ... I don't know how they manage to keep those prices and compete with Fly540. However, I haven't been on a Fly540 plane yet, so it's possible that I'll figure out why it's so cheap once I board ... maybe I'll have to pedal :)

2. Airport security is a bit more relaxed here. I have 4 inch knife with me which I put in the bag I was planning on checking. At this airport you go through the X-ray machine before you are even allowed to enter the terminal, which means you go through X-ray before you have gotten your ticket or checked your bag. The security staff noticed my knife as it appeared on the screen and asked me "Do you have a knife in your bag?" to which I responded "Yes, but I am going to check it" ... they smiled and sent me on my way. I am now sitting next to my gate and I other than that first X-ray machine I haven't had my bags scanned or checked again ... which means that they have no way of knowing whether or not I actually checked the knife (I did check it). I just thought that was interesting, in Kenya's defense I think their security is probably just as good as ours they just don't go to as much trouble to give off the "illusion of security" that we do. In fact when we were on our way to Kenya in June, one of my fellow travelers came up to me during our layover in the Heathrow airport and said "I just found a 5 inch knife in my carry-on that I forgot was there, what should I do?" ... so U.S. security totally dropped the ball on that one.

3. The Fly540 staff at the ticketing counter didn't use a computer to assign me a seat or give me my boarding pass. My boarding pass looks like a normal U.S. boarding pass except that where you would normally have printed information telling you what your flight#/seat#/etc.. are there is hand-written ink. When I checked in I walked up to the counter and asked if I could have a window seat. They consulted a piece of paper that had a diagram of the plane's seats, saw that one hadn't been crossed off yet and then told me I could. They then crossed off that seat and scrawled some info onto my boarding pass and handed it over. The whole process reminded me of how I am used to getting a table at a restaurant, it certainly works fine for boarding a plane but I'm just used to having computers a little more involved in the process.


4. The gate I am sitting at now is pretty similar to gates in any small U.S. airport. There is no jetway, when I go through the gate I will walk out onto the tarmac and then go up a set of steps to board the plane. The thing I find striking about this gate is the noise factor. There are quite a few planes in close proximity to where I am and the doors between the building and the tarmac are left open at all times. This means that when the planes are revving up their engines it gets really quite loud in here, far louder than any airport I have been in before. I have also noticed that none of the airport workers out on the tarmac are wearing any ear protection which is a different sight when you are used to the the large headphone-like ear-protectors that American airport staff wear.
Well, that's all for now. I'm hoping that my hotel in Mombasa will have internet access, if it does I'll finish up this post and get it up on online for all my devoted readers to see :)

So, you have probably figured out that I made it to Mombasa and found a way to get internet access. They have wireless in the rooms ... it's really slow but it works. I hope you are enjoying these posts, because it takes a while to put them up :)