Marathoning

Before I arrived in Kenya, Simon made a friend named John who frequents the local bar regularly. Now, John is a very big man both influentially and physically. And he loves to buy alcohol for friends. Simon already knew this very well, but I was introduced to it just this past Friday. We had crossed paths earlier in the week when he mentioned that he would like to take us out to supper on Friday. We obliged him and before you know it Friday was upon us. We had planned to meet at 7, which typically would mean that we would be eating around 7:30 or 8ish. Not that night! Meeting at 7 meant lets sit down and drink for 2 hours on empty stomachs and then drive to a restaurant. We were beginning to wonder if we would make it through the night.

Just before leaving the bar I ordered a bottle of water, which did both of us wonders in terms of prolonging our ability to oblige the free drinks being bought for us. We made it to the restaurant, which conveniently had a butcher shop in the front end, or was that just the kitchen? Anyhow, John picked out a goat leg, an entire freaking goat leg and asked us how it looked. Ha, I have never seen such a good-looking piece of meat in Africa. An entire freaking goat leg. We then walked through the maize of tables and minibars before settling at the main bar that was close to the live musician who was filling our ears with upbeat Swahili dance songs.

At the bar, we continued drinking still with no food in our stomachs. And then out of nowhere this other woman comes up to us and sits down next to me (turns out it was John’s mistress). Not wanting to draw anymore attention to our little party he decided to have her sit next to me so that the attention wouldn’t be focused on him. Ok, I see where he was coming from, but its kind of hard not draw attention to yourself by bringing two white guys into an upscale late-night restaurant. Fortune favored me this night though. Simon and I had previously discussed the tactics of life. Given two options….take the funnier one. Well John’s mistress wanted to dance, but he didn’t want to so she grabbed my hand and he told me to go! Now imagine this scene: Kenyan nightclub with a central dance floor where there are currently two people dancing and then this 22 year old Mzungu walks out into the middle of the floor with a 40 somethin’ year old woman who weighs about two of him. Needless to say, eyes were fixated. Thank God for liquid courage.

Simon followed suit a few songs later upon my return to the bar for refueling purposes. After an hour or so of this, and still no food, we made our way up to the upper level bar where some of John’s other friends were waiting for us. We drank some more there and then danced more. I threw another bottle of water in there just for kicks as I didn’t really see it doing much at the time, but it was probably a life-saver. Around that time John found another woman for me to dance with, a seemingly drunk manager of the restaurant who had her eyes set on something that she definitely wasn’t going to get. Coincidentally, right before we started dancing I tried to get up to go to the bathroom before getting corralled to the dance floor by the manager. So all the while I was trying to find an exit clause…Enter Simon. He saw that I was somewhat distraught, which I must say doesn’t happen to often anymore, and came down to run interference. I made my escape and then returned to the floor looking to get him out of the same predicament. Then I spotted a few girls that we had been casually keeping tabs on. Bingo! I went up and started dancing with them and then spun around grabbed Simon away from another woman who had taken the place of the manager and threw him into the mix of girls. They happened to all be sisters and their older brother and I had a kind of dance off after I saw him trying to get some candids of the mzungu dancing with his sisters. It was straight out of a movie and it was great. The musician then decided to take a break so we returned to our lookout point with John at roughly the same time that the food arrived, midnight. Better late than never I always say. We downed the food and had room for the rest of the goat, but decided not to push our luck as it had been a great evening thus far. We continued drinking and talking and dancing until around 4am, yes we drank nonstop for 9 count it 9 hours. And it was all free. Boom Roasted.

We finally wrapped things up, but before we left I had to take the funnier of two options. I found a napkin, wrote down my name and number, coolly swagged my way across the dance floor and handed it to the girl I was dancing with amid the surprise laughter of all of her sisters, turned around and powerwalked my way to a laughing Simon and went to the car. We got in and then began thinking that we were getting into a car with some very big men who had been drinking for the better part of a day and were about to drive on a dangerous road under construction in the middle of the night. We strapped in, real tight. Luckily our host was of the same mindset and decided to take the back roads, which gave us some comfort aside from the fact that we did think at one point that we could possibly have been abducted just as easily as returned to the Amani Center.

Well we weren’t and we made it back safely. Then I decided to start skyping people, always a good time especially when it doesn’t cost anything (assist to Google). If you got a call from a number in California or a garbled message that cuts in and out…Pole (sorry ‘kind of’ in Kiswahili). I think I made it to bed around 5.