Catching up: Mombasa and Christmas, and Starfish Village

A door in Mombasa. 

I admit... I've been super negligent about updating the blog. It turns out that morning sickness lasts all day and is NOT conducive to food blogging, particularly when all I ate from weeks 7-15, for the most part, was noodles, toast, toast with bananas, smoothies, and apples. Whoops. However! I'm going to remedy all this and try to be post-heavy over the next week or two to update everyone on what we've been up to (besides, you know, growing a baby.)

A dad and his daughter waiting for the Mombasa Ferry. (So cute!)

Let's start with our second trip to Mombasa over the holidays. We flew both ways (you recall how we feel about the train) and stayed at the same beach cottages (Sand Island Beach- totally recommend it!) that we stayed at before. (We even hid a bottle of soy sauce and olive oil in the rafters so we wouldn't have to buy new stuff!) We spent the week reading, dozing (in my case), playing in the water, eating fresh fish (in Nathan's case) and otherwise relaxing.

Our little cottage. 

The beach out front at low tide.

Our Christmas breakfast was pancakes with passionfruit sauteed pineapple, and Christmas dinner was a freshly caught baked fish, and sukuma wiki with my number one (unattainable) pregnancy craving: mac'n'cheese. (Friends sent a box from the States, hooray!)

One of the strangest experiences we've had thus far in Kenya took place a day or two after Christmas, when we took a little boat ride to Starfish Village. Take a minute to imagine what that might be. We thought we'd be ferried out to a little spot on the reef where hundreds of starfish magically convene in a village-like formation. (Perhaps with a little Starfish Mayor?) Well, in fact, we were boated out in a hollowed out log to a random spot offshore, where the water was about 1-3 feet deep. Our two guides then instructed us to walk around and collect starfish in order to pile them in one great heap in a central area. It turns out that we were to create the village ourselves. Ok.

Nathan and the guides, mid-collection. 

So Nathan and I wander around with the two guides, collecting gorgeous multi-colored starfish within 100 meters of the boat, and when the guides decided we'd collected enough, they instructed us to take pictures. Ok.

They were really pretty, and the rounded-up-starfish effect was really neat. But apparently the tour guides weren't satisfied with us taking a few artistic shots of starfish in water, starfish in our hands. They wanted posing! So we spent the next 15 minutes modeling with the starfish in awkward ways as the guides piled starfish on us, made starfish jewelry, and otherwise organized starfish on our bodies.

Note that I'm squinting, because the starfish on my head are dripping seawater in my eyes. 

(There's a 14-week old fetus in that belly!)

Yeah. We weren't quite sure what to make of the whole starfish village experience. On the one hand, the guides make enough money posing starfish with tourists that they aren't tempted to capture and dry them to sell dried starfish to tourists. On the other hand, I can't imagine the starfish like being collected and piled on SPF-covered tourists several times a day. Regardless, it was another fascinating Kenyan experience.