Well the Red Light District of Frankfurt, Germany didn't treat us too horribly. City Hotel West was situated somewhere between "Double D" the "Sex Inn" and "Foxy Ladies." Our Bulgarian bartender at a little old fashioned bar cooked us a "free" meal for our last night there. $218.80 euros later we finally made it out of there. Mario, you will still get your SDSU mug but you dropped a couple cool points for that. Overall, Germany was amazing! I wish we would have had a few more days to explore more of the area and visit a concentration camp two hours away. I will be going back to Europe again someday! The service at the restaurants were awful, but people were nice and spoke English well. They could tell we were American from 2 miles away so imagine what we look like to the Kenyan's!
Our plane arrived in Mombasa at 1:15 am local time. That's 9 hours ahead of mountain time at home. We had flown from Frankfurt over the Liberian Dessert to Sudan so we took pictures of the Nile River. We flew from there to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It was really cold when we got off the plane and walked to the terminal. The toilets are also nothing but a hole in the ground with no toilet paper... that was fun. 2 hours from there we reached our final destination: Mombasa, Kenya! Customs is hilarious. Trisha showed the lady her passport and she asked if we had anything to declare. We said no and she said welcome to Kenya and waved us through. Basically, our entire group got into the country on Trisha's passport! Excellent :) The ride from the airport to the compound was surreal. It was abandoned building after abandoned building lined with people sleeping on the sidewalks. You see things like this on the news and in movies, but seeing it in real life is truly heartbreaking. The poverty here is very real.
The next day I didn't wake up until 11, jet lag got the best of me for a few days. Staying out until 4 am and waking up at 11 or 12 the past few days probably didn't help. Once everyone was up we got a tour of the beach and market from Issac. The market is actually really nice and sells a lot of things you can find in the United States. There is also a Cinema and some other little shops in the area. I haven't felt unsafe at all yet. Mia, a student here from Texas warned us about not taking the matutu's which are vans that drive around like taxi's. She said they will just over price you and drop you off in random places. The tuktuk's and the driver's of the van's at the compound are the safest. Walking has also been a good option. 10 minutes to the beach, about 15 to the market. It feels like we are going to die everytime we get in a tuktuk, but they are actually good... well, defensive drivers. Kenyan's are pretty laid back, slow moving people. The 10 minute walk to the beach took 30 when Issac led us there, but if you put them in a moving vehicle they become a whole different person! Honking, cutting people off, yelling at each other etc.
The beach is gorgeous! You have to walk down a little ways to get in front of the resort to avoid the garbage and Kenyan's trying to sell you stuff. There are also camel rides, but we haven't tried that yet. I will try to post more pictures in the next couple of days. It's kind of hard to get internet here. I'm sharing a computer with Trisha since my Galaxy Tab doesn't have a USB to plug a modem in to. The cafe by the market has free wifi though, and really good coffee!!
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