hujambo

Well, I had attempted to make a blog post last night, but unfortunately just as I hit "publish" the powered failed, the wireless went out, and the post was lost forever. How sad. It was great too, but you'll never know. I'm writing now after the first day of classes since we have some free time as it's our first day. Hopefully I'll be able to catch a dahla dahla into Arusha to buy a flashlight and watch which I think will be necessary pretty soon.

Just to update on the trip here and my first impressions:

I traveled for nearly three full days. The morning train from Pittsburgh to DC left at 5 am. I slept mostly, but my eyes opened occasionally to give me glimpses of the passing scenery. Everywhere were gorgeous gentle green valleys and I was a bit sad to leave as I passed through Panther Hollow and looked up at the house I called home for the last few months. DC was chaotic, the train arrived 2 hours late, the metro was backed up due the orange metro line (the one I had intended to take) jumping the tracks and backing everything up. So I had to surface at L'Enfant plaza and wait in the heat with my bags for the city bus to Dulles. All in all, no big deal, and I was amazed at the patience and friendliness of the people of DC through the whole ordeal. Ethiopian airlines was not the nicest, but I had two seats to myself to stretch out and sleep on. After stopping in Rome for refueling, and flying across North Africa we landed in Addis Ababa where I spent the night. The hotel was dubiously called the Hotel Semen on my transfer ticket, but it wasn't bad and I was only there for a few hours to sleep.

My impression of Addis is this: it's like someone got it in their head to make their own version of the typical Indian city, but somehow got everything just slightly wrong. The people have sharp features and light skin and look not quite like Indians, but certainly not like Africans. The Amharic script (called "moonscript" by Tyler Trawick) is devoid of any resemblance to Devanagari, like nothing I have seen before. At 8,000 ft. high the city is just a little too cold to be any major Indian city I have ever been to. The Coptic church looks a bit like Hinduism sometimes, but with crosses placed everywhere. The jetlag must have exacerbated the feeling that everything was just slightly out of place.

On the transfer I was able to meet a couple people and hear their views on Africa and Tanzania, and the problems and solutions they face: a woman from Kenya who works for a consortium of NGOs in East Africa and the US, a extraordinarily friendly businessman from Dar Es Salaam, and pilot, originally from Hershey who has been working plane for hire taking tourists into the Serengeti for the last two years. All very different, all very interesting.

The plane ride from Addis to Kilimanjaro airport via Nairobi was fun, I met Boon, a Malaysian student at Duke who is doing the Engineering World Health program as well. On our way in we had an incredible view of the summit of Kilimanjaro, which I won't forget soon. As soon as I can, I'll edit that picture into this post.

If I get time tomorrow, I'll post about classes and my host family, etc.

On a side note, there are monkeys everywhere and it is awesome. I love monkeys.

::edit:: finally, kilimanjaro