St. Patty's

It just wouldn’t be right if I didn’t do something big for what seems like an annual 21st birthday. Simon and I, decided to pay a visit to the Guinness factory in Nairobi to drown our sorrows of coming up short in the meeting earlier that day at Safaricom.

It took a while finding the darn place and once we did it was even tougher to get inside. I think we ended up parking illegally after blocking up delivery truck traffic for a few minutes. “It’s all good! Two guys in 3 piece suits, we own the place…” We went into the reception area to find out that tours had to be scheduled. After some deliberation we convinced the woman at the desk to make a call for us and get us the name of the person in charge of it all. She did, and sent us to the corporate office just down the road and told us to tell the security guards that we were there to see so-and-so and were cleared by so-and-so.

Likely story. We walked the half-mile to the corporate building, it wasn’t even Guinness, but a local beer called Tusker. The guards didn’t believe our story and made a call only to tell us that the result of the call was that we had to make the same call that they just made. We didn’t understand, but did it anyways. After about 20 minutes of standing at the guard house it started raining. Good thing we walked. Wait… We finally got a hold of the woman we needed only to find out that they have formally discontinued tours and we had no realistic chance of getting in. I joked that we should claim to be beer inspectors in 3-piece suits, but we let that one go.

Dan took the guards umbrella and ran, err walked back to the car and came to pick us up before heading back to the monastery. He left promptly afterwards and Simon and I crashed for a few hours. Upon waking up in time for supper we remembered that oh yeah, it’s St. Patty’s Day! Good thing we brewed a new batch of Pineapple Cider three days before. We ate and then partied it up with the Spaniards who brought along a bottle of Johnny Walker among other things. We drank the place dry.

All four of us took personal days from work the following morning and life was good.