Thursday, June 28, 2012

Back in Mozambique



June 28, 2012
I just woke up from an 18 hour sleep in Maputo, Mozambique.
My mom and I left our hotel in Columbia at 4:45 a.m. and headed for the airport, where I secured my boarding passes from Columbia to Johannesburg and said goodbye to Mom at security (xoxo). The flight from Columbia to D.C. was about an hour long and fairly uneventful, as was the flight to New York. When I arrived in New York, I took the Airtrain to the International Terminal, checked in at the South African Airways counter, and went through security again amidst a large crowd of people. The flight to Johannesburg seemed pretty short, actually—it was only 15 hours instead of 18 because we left from New York and didn’t have a stop in Senegal. After watching “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and reading, and trying to sleep, and asking for vegetarian food and receiving meat food and going to the back of the plane only to be handed a raw salmon and onion sandwich and being so hungry that I ate it anyway like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, we landed in Johannesburg at last. There, I traded my e-ticket printout for a boarding pass to Maputo, ate some lunch, and waited for my fourth and final plane. This flight was also about an hour long, and when it landed at around 3:00, Central Africa Time, my dad and his friend John were there at the airport. It was weird to be back in Mozambique—it's hard to believe it's been a whole year since I was last here. After I unpacked and settled into Caleb's room (you are welcome to be jealous, Mr. London Intern), we had a tasty dinner outside at a little cafĂ© and I went to sleep at 9:30. I woke up today at about 5:00 to my dad opening my windows and saying “you’re about to miss the sunshine of June 28, 2012!”