{"id":16,"date":"2011-02-23T12:57:17","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T12:57:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/?p=16"},"modified":"2015-05-23T13:34:55","modified_gmt":"2015-05-23T13:34:55","slug":"eldoret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/2011\/02\/23\/eldoret\/","title":{"rendered":"Eldoret!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"market\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Today has been a great day. I got up way too early in the morning because another one of the med students and I were going into Eldoret to pick up the long-time surgeon and his wife, who have been home in the States for the past 3 weeks (they\u2019ve otherwise lived here 12 years now). We made it to Eldoret (2 hours away) shortly after 8:30, which gave us almost 3 hours to do our shopping. I had no idea how much I\u2019d adjusted to Kapsowar and Kenya. First off, the bumpy roads from my drive in to Kapsowar were so much better; they seemed great. I still got really excited to see a monkey (colobus is apparently the name of the type of monkey) running across the road, then hanging out in the trees. Then, Eldoret felt like a city, and I\u2019m sure it\u2019s much smaller than anything I would have called a city back home. But there were so many people, and I didn\u2019t know any of them, and so many streets and cars and pedestrians. There were also a lot (ok maybe I saw 8 or so) mzungu around, none of which I knew\u2026I hadn\u2019t realized how used I was to not seeing any mzungu I didn\u2019t know around town. I also really wondered what they were doing in Eldoret, as it\u2019s really not on the tourist trail of Kenya.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We went souvenir shopping at a cultural shop, then at some market stalls. Again, everything\u2019s so cheap, and bargaining\u2019s a big part of buying, but it\u2019s easy to get caught up in the Kenyan mindset of \u201cno, that\u2019s more than the really really cheap price we want to pay\u201d. Still, I was able to actually obtain some souvenirs of my trip\u2013something that\u2019s impossible to do in kapsowar. Still no postcards\u2026I\u2019m not sure the Northern Rift Valley has gotten that far yet in terms of tourist items. They should\u2014the scenery around here would make beautiful postcards. We picked up the surgeon and his wife (who had met me a bit over 3 weeks ago when I arrived in Eldoret) and had initially planned to leave right after they got in from Nairobi. True to Kenyan style, 2 hours later we were on the way back to Kapsowar.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I got back and instead of going into work, I baked Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, Kapsowar style, which means raw and unrefined sugar was used in place of the white and brown sugar and the amount of butter (and salt and baking soda) was guestimated. The dough was pretty sweet, but the cookies baked up ok. Remember that the oven has no thermometer, and we\u2019re at very high altitude, so I\u2019m pretty pleased they turned out, when it\u2019s all said and done. Tonight we had a going away dinner for a resident who\u2019s been visiting\u2014I\u2019m really sad to think I\u2019ll be leaving as well in only 5 days. The dinner was a lot of fun\u2014we made homemade pizzas (the only way you can find pizza anywhere near here) and had cake and the cookies I had baked. We also had a great time playing the game Settlers of Catan, which I had never heard of or played before. It\u2019s normally a 6 player game, but we created teams so all of us could play. My partner and I were losing pretty badly at first, but we jumped in the lead to win unexpectedly. I\u2019m really happy that I\u2019ve had such a great group of people to work with so far away from home!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Today has been a great day. I got up way too early in the morning because another one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/meghanhofto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}