morning moonlight

Day 12 (9/16)
This morning I learned that at 5:30AM here it is still completely dark, the stars are still out and this morning the moon was out too. This morning was the first time I saw the moon, you could see the whole circle, and only a small sliver was white. I went into the kitchen and Arthur was there instead of Susan. I think he is my favorite. Last night he gave me cold milk for my cornflakes...which is hard to come by at 7pm. This morning he was so cute, I walked into the kitchen, and he goes “you’ve done cook crew before, yes?” (I nodded and said I wasn’t very good at it though). He laughed and said “oh good today is my day one and we can learn together”. Then I got started putting dough into a pot of boiling oil and waited until it was like a doughnut. Then he wanted me to peel potatoes with a steak knife and I laughed at him. So he let me wash the apples instead.

We all loaded into the Land Cruisers, drove about a half hour. Got to a medium sized abrupt hill and climbed it. About a 12th of the size of the climb we did a few days ago. Then we spent 2 hours up there for our field lecture. It was pretty up there, but not much to see, mainly farmland and open rangeland. We could see Kili extremely clearly in the early morning, and as the morning went on the clouds started to kiss the top of the mountain again. The Chyulu Hills were in the far distance; you could see the small mountain we climbed before…even from far away it looks huge. Kiringe had the coolest lab coat ever on today (he wears lab coats to teach in) but the one he had on today had these amazing drawings of birds that students made him last year, flamingos, and a peacock, and some others.

It’s amazing how the sun affects temperature completely. From 8-10 while we were up on the hill, there were no clouds in the sky and the sun was intense but it was totally comfortable because the air was still slightly cool. By 2 it’s decently hot but the air doesn’t hold any heat. And by 6 when the sun goes down again it will start to cool off and get down to 50 at night. Zero humidity is an amazing thing.

P.S. I did some of my laundry today. It wasn’t as big of a failure as I expected. Different, really different but not a disaster.