The Eyes Have It...

One of my friends wrote a blog the other day with the same title.  He had some actual deep and interesting thoughts on the subject. Me, on the other hand, was just reminded of the Nairobi Eyes which have been out in full force these past few days.

I've blogged about these nasty little creatures before.  But I've not seen quite as many of them as I have in the past few days.  They are mean little things... but righteously so, I guess, since they only hurt you once you've squashed them dead on your skin!  They emit a little acid burn when squashed.  Not so pleasant.  So far, three out of 10 of us on the compound have been burned in the past couple of days.  I've seen 6 of them in my house (half of those landing on my skin!) over the past three days.  They have definitely started to terrorize us.  But I guess if this little tiny fly is all we have to be afraid of, we're doing pretty good!

I went shopping today with my neighbors.  We went all over town, including to the nursery to pick up some new plants.  It's good fun going out and about with them!  The most exciting part of the day was going into the super fancy import "supermarket" (about the size of two 7-11s put together) and finding two whole shelves full of "buy one get one free"!  I loaded up on raman noodles (they're normally about $1.50 for a package, and today were half price!  They also had Mars bars, which are normally the same price as the noodles, and again, half price!  I also bought two huge bottles of ketchup, for a steal of a deal at $4.00!  Last time I bought some ketchup, R mentioned to me that his children LOVE ketchup.  But it's one of those things that's normally pretty expensive, so not an every day sort of thing here.  So I splurged on the "Buy one get one free" ketchup sale and R's kids will be happy for a few meals at Christmas time :)

Speaking of ketchup, the other day as I was trying to shake the ketchup out of the little glass ketchup bottle, I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to have a squeezy bottle of ketchup, like at home.  I mean, really, I never really appreciated the squeezy ketchup bottles until I had to do battle with these silly little glass things.  But I thought, there's no way I'd find a squeezy bottle of real ketchup here.  Lo and behold, today, in the "supermarket", I found a squeezy bottle of ketchup.  But there was absolutely no way I could justify the $17 price tag!  Yes, that's right.  $17 for a squeezy bottle of Heinz ketchup - and we're not talking the giant Costco size here, people.  Just a little one that would fit on the door in your fridge!  I can't imagine anyone paying that much for a bottle of ketchup.  It must be like "dijon ketchup" or something...

We also stopped at a craft fair today.  My nose is so good - I had very sketchy directions on how to get there, but somehow, I navigated through the side streets and found the Mother's Union building and we found a whole bunch of women sitting around with their handicrafts for sale!  The sign said that they were going to shut down at 3pm, and we arrived at 3:04pm.  But we went in anyway, and they didn't look to be anywhere near closing up shop!  Good thing, too, because in the 30 minutes that we were there, looking and buying, the place got packed out with other expats who had come to get some little trinkets.  I love those sorts of things - they're held once or twice a year by various women's groups.  It's just so nice to buy stuff from these women who are using what they know the make a bit of income. I bought a few little trinkets to bring to my friends in Ethiopia who I will see this weekend.  It's rare to find anything that's actually made in this country which are "gift-worthy", so this was perfect timing for me!