Looks like Livingstone: Welcome to the Jungle

"PS. Monkeys WILL come in if you leave the window in the livingroom open!"

Friendly advice written on a note in the kitchen of our appartment.
Turned out to be quite useful advice.

After our somewhat intense first meeting with Nairobi we soon found ourselves installed in a spacious appartment neighbouring with a park by the name of the "Arboretum". This was a calculated move from our side. When we were searching for proper accomodation we had rather modest demands for it. The main thing was that it would be reasonably priced and within walking distance to our workplace at the University of Nairobi Chiromo Campus. Even beforehand we had the feeling that the traffic could be something that one might want to avoid getting into as far as possible. And this turned out to be a very good assumption. Even though our friend, the taxi driver Patrick told us that we can never predict the traffic situation it is almost always completely clogged during weekday mornings and afternoons. So as everybody is stuck in their cars we just gently walk pass them on the side of the road during our 20 minute walk to the university.

Eventhough Nairobi is a huge metropolis it is still a rather green city. A lot greener that I had first thought. There are trees almost everywhere and sometimes you don't have to go far to believe that you are way off in some rural countryside or in the middle of a tropical jungle. That especially goes for our view from our balcony. One can sit there for hours and just gaze into the flora and fauna of the Arboretum. Sometimes it is like living in the middle of a zoo. There are countless spieces of birds who fly in and out of the foilage and above the treetops. Nils, beeing a fullblown birdwatcher is in seventh heaven. The fact that the Arboretum is some kind of migratory landing zone doesn't make things worse. There are new types of birds coming in every week. Some of them aren't always so pleasing for us humans though, especially us who like to sleep in sometimes, or at least sleep past six o' clock in the morning. The park is held hostage by a large number of Ibis birds, and they have a rather nasty habit of screaming. And then I really mean SCREAMING! I've never heard anything like it. Everytime when the sun rises or sets, as on a given command they will all at the same time engage in a cacaphony of screaming noise that would make even Rob Hallford jealous. It is almost eiry how they can be so in sync and all start screaming at exactly the same time. And we keep wondering what they are saying. The best that we've come up with is:

"The sun is coming up!" - screams bird one
"Yeah, it's really coming up!" - answers the other 101 birds screaming on the top of their lungs
"Yeah, the sun is really coming up!" - bird one replies
"Oh yes, the sun IS coming up!" - the rest continue as all of the windows within a mile cracks

But then, all kinds of colourful birds kind of fall short when it comes to exotism, since we got at least two different kind of monkeys living in the trees outside our window. Yes, MONKEYS!! At least for us Scandinavians that is something really exotic! We actually had our first encounter with them the very first day, when they were climbing around on our concrete windowsills. They will sometimes even venture out from their habitat in the trees and stroll around on the streets. They also seem to be interested in higher education since we saw quite a lot of them roaming around the university campus one day. Or maybe they were just interested in looting the trash that is stored in different places around the campus. The most intense encounter although was one day when we came home tired after a long day at work. Sitting on our balcony was a huge monkey, looking slightly guilty but very pleased, eating a banana. "Funny" we thought, "wonder where he could have gotten that banana?". When we walked further into the appartment it turned out that the bugger had pried open our window and elegantly hieved himself into the appartment. After finding the kitchen and messing about with our fruit basked he had settled on a bunch of bananas which he then decided to enjoy sitting on the balcony. So it turns out, that just closing the windows isn't really enough to keep these clever fruit thieves out...