An Actual Real Post?

An actual real post?
Hardly. So although this whole adventure began just over one week ago, I’ve yet to really post that frequently promised “real substantive” Kenya post just yet; you know the one where talk about all of the crazy experiences I’ve had and food I’ve eaten and people I’ve met, with long laundry lists of “and then I went with my new friend_________ to______ And it was SO _______. OMG this is such a totally __________ experience.”
So if you’ve been reading thus far, its not going to be a huge shock to learn that I don’t have a really strong interest in writing that kind of blog; no, no, my interests are far more pretentious than that; I want to craft cleverly worded observations that cut to some deep, eternal truth about the world around me (in 500 words or less). Okay, maybe that’s not quite it either, but I do see a few different aims of this blog.
1) Posting semi-regularly just so that family/friends/others who might care know that I’ve survived another _____days
2) Forcing me to actually think about and reflect on what I’m experiencing here and trying to coalesce it into some kind of coherent idea; that is to understand through writing.
3) Try to connect what I’ve learned in the last three years of studying academic political science to the “real world”; that is to try to connect the world of theory (which is definitely my comfort zone) to the world of “doing” (see what Luc has to say about why attempting this is both important and difficult)
4) Practicing writing in a clear, easy to follow way (READ: picking up on journalistic skills that I have missed by quitting the Yale Daily News after the first semester of my Freshman year).
5) Putting some kind of travel information for Kenya/Nairobi out there on the web. I found that good information on travel resources here was a little tough to come by, so I’ll try to make this a repository of hotel/hostels/guesthouses/restaurants/safari companies, both good and bad that is somewhere in scope between disjointed messageboard posts (which rarely have any kind of comparative perspective) and guidebooks of the lonely planet/rough guide variety, which are so voluminous that it is hard to make a decision just by looking them.

That said, I’ve found it hard to really sit down and write those kind of posts thus far. Its not that I haven’t been having experiences; but rather the exact opposite; I’ve taken so much in that at the end of each day I’ve been too overwhelmed to really make sense of all that I saw in that day. What makes this tougher is that its not that I’ve really DONE anything extraordinary yet; for the last week I’ve been figuring out how to LIVE here, and thus have been doing relatively un-glamourous things such as looking for housing, figuring out public transportation, and buying food; topics that are both too trivially inane to write about and at the same time still too much for me to totally comprehend and describe adequately. However, I’m going to have to start somewhere (I only have so many more posts in me like the RAZR or the malaria that I had been thinking about before I came here, and thus which made me react only minimally to my environment before launching into rants I’ve ranted before), so I’m going to try to put down a few paragraph-length observations over the next day or so, hopefully to be expounded upon later.