A day in Egypt

Ah, it sounds so pretentious to be somewhere for just a day, but it was because my layover was ten and a half hours.  I loved it!  We went to see the pyramids in Giza, the sphinx, a few pretty cool tombs, and a mosque.  We also ate falafel and shawerma, of course, which our tour guide said made us at least 10% Egyptian.  I was grateful to have a travel companion, Johanna, who I’d only met just before we boarded our flight out of JFK.  We exchanged a few emails beforehand since she’s doing an internship with UNICEF in Kampala and we found out we were on the same flight.  I was excited that there was something we could do for such a long layover and very relieved to be with someone I “knew” as I traveled so far from what I know.  



We also drove around downtown Cairo a bit, seeing the square where people often gathered a couple years ago during the revolution, before we got out to walk around an Egyptian neighborhood.  We dove right into the chaos of shopping, transporting goods, lots of traffic on what should be one-way streets, impatient drivers ceaselessly honking horns, and, once we got closer to the HUGE market, shop owners asking us in broken English to come take a look or telling us that we were pretty.  Johanna has pictures of the big mosque we saw, and there were all kinds of pretty minurets.  It was fascinating to learn a bit more about Islam - I want to know more.

The pyramids were incredible.  I’ve had the blessing to travel to other wondrous ruins from ancient civilizations—Tikal, Tegucigalpa, Machu Picchu, and more—so the idea of amazing things built long ago was not new, but the sheer size of the Giza pyramids was what primarily impressed me.  They’re huge, and that’s fairly striking in itself, but once you realize the painstaking precision used to build these things perfectly, you’re left in awe.  



 Being just 5cm off with one of the massive limestone blocks at the bottom of the Great Pyramid would have resulted in a discrepancy of 15-20 meters at the top.  Everything is perfectly aligned, and all of the stones somehow were polished such that they fit right next to each other and hold together without anything to bond them.  It’s insane.  How does one get two huge blocks of limestone to be so smooth that they can fit so closely that one can’t even slip a piece of paper between them?  Crazy.  It leaves me worshipping God for being the ultimate Artist.  



The whole time I looked up at the pyramids, seeing the seamless transition from one stone block to the next and feeling the smoothness of the outer layer of polished limestone, I couldn’t help but think about how worthy of praise the Source of this crazy wisdom and architectural understanding is.  Imagine how much more stunning these would be if all of the original exterior were there!  Each of the pyramids was originally covered entirely with polished limestone as you see to the right (that's why the top of one of the pyramids looks snowcapped).   Breathtaking.

Inside one of the nobles' tombs

The latest theory about how these multi-ton stones got to the top of the pyramids is an internal switchback-type ramp that circled the interior, and there is French infrared technology that can “see” whether there are gaps in the building where we’d expect them to be if this theory were to be true.  The permissions to check that out will likely come through in the next 5-10 years—how cool!

Johanna and I were exhausted after our ten-hour flight from JFK and seven hours in Cairo, so we plopped down in the comfy airport chairs, tried to connect to internet with little success, grabbed something to eat, and waited to board our flight so that we could sleep.  It was a long day, but a good one.

Craziness as the journey begins

It's been hectic for the past few days, and I don't feel collected or focused in the way that I wanted to feel as I begin what seems like my REAL summer.  I came back from San Francisco to New Haven by way of New York, but my ride into New Haven was long and difficult.  Not only was it late and 2.5 times the normal length due to bad weekend traffic, but I also threw up twice.  I'm not sure if it was a bad reaction to the malaria medication I'm taking (the weekly pill is six times cheaper but probably also seven times stronger than the daily pill), or if I was just nausea, but it was no fun to say the least.  The following three days were a blast, though, as I worked commencement and hung out with the other Master's aides.  I then had some difficulty getting to New York because of the Metro North derailment on the NY-New Haven line, but I got to my parents' hotel late the night before my older brother's class day.  I realized two days later that if Amara and I were going to climb Mt. Meru, I needed my hiking boots, which conveniently were in storage in the Calhoun basement in New Haven. 

So, after my parents and brother left for their plane back to California, I hopped on a train back to my beloved New Haven (having missed the one I intended to catch by five minutes, fail.).  I found my hiking boots and warm clothes so that I won't freeze at the summit and then spent a great night hanging out with two of my best friends until four. 

I just barely caught the train back to New York, found my way back to our hotel where I'd left my bag (without getting lost, wooo!), and took a taxi to get on the NYC Airporter shuttle to JFK.  Of course, just as I was getting out of the cab, it started pouring rain, and I joined several others who were waiting.  They hadn't been allowed on the previous bus because it was full and were worried they were going to miss their flights.  We waited about 45 minutes (thankfully moving to wait underneath an overpass rather than getting soaked) for a shuttle that took 2 hours and fifteen minutes.  Keep in mind that the website says that shuttles come every 20-30 minutes and take an average of 90 minutes to get from midtown to JFK.  Go team.  Apparently, the bus driver thought it was a good idea to drop us off at the arrivals level of terminal four, or stopping there was just convenient, given that it didn't seem like he was planning to stop there until several angry passengers screamed at him to do so.  I lugged my bags upstairs to departures, sat on the floor to rearrange my stuff, checked in, and breezed through security to my gate.  After deciding that some mediocre-looking pizza was my best bet for dinner, I sat down to charge my iPod and computer, listened to a couple bicker for twenty minutes simply about sneakily taking photos of the other, and then read Jeremiah on the plane for quite some time until our flight left over an hour late. 

So that was my little introduction to dealing with delays and the unexpected, of which I'm sure I'll get much more this summer :)

Summertime in Africa

It's real.  I'll be in Africa in ten days.  What?!  Lots of planning done, yet lots of mystery up ahead.
It's about time I set out.  What am I actually doing?

• Seeing Cairo on my layover, thankfully with a friend.
• Spending a few days settling into the apartment in Kampala that I’ll share with a few others from school in Kampala.
• Hanging out in Dar, Arusha, and Zanzibar, then back to Uganda.
• Interning for seven weeks with Walimu, which is doing amazing things.

I’ll be a fish out of water for eight weeks, but I know I’m going to work hard, learn at an exponential pace, and be challenged in many and varied ways.

This is going to be a good summer—an adventure.