Blankets & Wine

Voilà le blanket et les vins!

You can tell which one I picked, right? The late harvest on the right was a sweet deliciousness that tasted more like apple juice than wine. Ideal for washing down the Italian baked pastries we had for dessert. Thanks V.

Adding cheese, crackers and good company and you got yourself a sweet Sunday afternoon.

Might have been edition XXXV (this is 35 for those that don’t read Roman numerals well. Personal history shows that getting past 49 with those is quite a nuisance.) overall, but it was my first Blankets & Wine. It’s just one of those fun, social things that happen every first Sunday of the month that everyone knows of. It also happens to be a high quality music gig bringing performers from around East Africa for a chill, jazzy, soul, reggae mixture of good music. This time there were even artists from Denmark and South Africa! P.S. Run by a friend of friend. Look at me meeting local elite and celebrities!

Turns out, Blankets & Wine is the social scene of that first Sunday of the month. I wish I had taken more photos. Some of the outfits and dos were awesome! As Kenyans come here to show of and see who’s who, expats come here to eat, drink and party. Which you could tell by the large coolers many of them brought and the exquisite picnic food pre-packed in plastic boxes. As we roll out in jeans and t-shirts (soon enough with red wine spilled on them, no news here), Kenyans, or I should say Nairobians (word or not a word? Google – yes, me – no, sounds too stupid to be a word and only gives 328K hits on .com) roll out in colorful summer dresses, Ray-Bans (I was wearing Ray-Bans too to make up for what was now two red wine stains on the 3 white stripes of my t-shirt), hats and neatly done new hairdos, ranging from fresh dreads to newly braided to just straightened.

By 5 PM things got a little jammed and I basically ran into every single person I’ve met in Nairobi so far who happened to be in town this weekend. Coolio. Caught up with old folks, met new ones, drank a decent amount of red, late harvest, red with Emmental and my randomly successful selection of crackers.

Yet, all good things come to an end and we called it a day quite early. Left what rumor had it an extra 4 hours of music for an hour long drive back to my place. As darkness spread its veil over my quite Nairobi-type suburbia, I was happily back home after an amazing day prepping myself for the Euro 2012 final and cheering for what soon turned out to be the loosing team. Really Italy? Really? 4:0? Love you España, but you can only be the underdog once.