Hello from Cape Town! Yes, I survived all 3 of the flights, and the 11 hour layover in the Frankfurt Airport. I've been avoiding updating my blog for a lot of reasons- not wanting to distract from my time here, especially while I’m just meeting everyone, wanting to use this space for the “bigger” ideas & experiences rather than as a daily “I ate some bananas today” diary (which, I did, with peanut butter- my snack of choice, if somehow you don’t know this about me yet). But, I’ll try to post a little more often to keep away the “ARE YOU ALIVE?!” e-mails I’ve been receiving from my uncle. I also didn’t want to blog angry, which was how I was feeling during about 90% of the whole travel experience.

I’m very hesitant to use my space here/time to talk about this, but let me tell you… I used to like airports. I used to like flying. And then I traveled here. The quote I began my last post with couldn’t have rung truer for my experience. Traveling for 3 days straight- it’s brutal. The layover in Frankfurt was the worst part. We (being my friends Sammy and Nikita- two of the best traveling companions I could have had, I think- thank you guys for being awesome!) thought it would be too complicated and expensive to leave the airport, so we decided to stay… which wound up, for several reasons, being a mistake. I like to think I’m a very calm/not easily flustered person, but I was miserable in Frankfurt. We spent the entire day in the airport’s only café/lounge area, cramming ourselves into awkward, circular arm chairs in front of a very noisy McDonald’s. As someone who likes to spend a lot of my time outside, it was painful not being able to go outside for over 48 hours. In Johannesburg- it was a very quick turnaround going to Cape Town, meaning claim your baggage, recheck it, and hop on the next plane- we got to walk outside to the bus that took us to our freestanding airplane loading area. I could have cried from happiness and relief. I can’t relay the gratitude I felt, at that moment, for the cool wind on my legs and the warm sun on my face. Jokes about airline food… too real, man. The two airlines we flew with (Lufthansa and South African Airways, I believe) were actually great, both in terms of the quality of food served and our experience with the flight attendants. Everyone was very kind and more than attentive to our group of 80+ 20-something year old, clearly American, clearly inexperienced travelers. Healthy eating & drinking lots of water is very important in my daily life (Hank Robinson, are you reading this?), though, and it’s just not possible to keep up those habits in an airplane or an airport café- which had huge effects on how I felt, mentally & physically, for those few days. It was also my first experience traveling to a country with a language barrier, aside from Quebec- where everyone I spoke to knew me, and spoke to me in English, though the official language there is French. Not everyone spoke English, which surprised me. Not speaking more than a word or two of German myself, it was sometimes very difficult to communicate in an effective way. I’m not going to pretend to know anything about the culture other than what I experienced that day in the airport, but being around the German airport workers was fairly unpleasant. Little behavioral things stuck out to me. Nobody smiled, and nobody seemed to tolerate even the simplest questions. American culture is just different, I think, in terms of things like customer service- on top of the complications of being foreigners, particularly Americans, in their country with their language… so on and so on. It was also my first face-to-face encounter with American discrimination. I’ll talk more about that and my changing perceptions on American culture in a different post. (I have a growing list in my journal on things to talk about. The hard part, for me, isn’t at all in finding things to talk about- just in finding the time to write about them as much as I want to in order to do the stories justice.)

The 10% of my travel experience that wasn’t unpleasant was spent in meeting people and in the views from the plane. I don’t want to talk too much about it in this post, because I’ll stay up way too late writing (it’s already 1am here, now) and I intend to reserve a post to talk about it later on, but let it suffice to say that I’m very glad to be on this trip with the people with me- which has been, to be honest, a big surprise for me. Anyway- the views from the plane. Unreal. I’ve always been a sucker for stars- I have two posters of the stars and constellations in my room back home- so the views at night were so special to me. I had a really hard time sleeping on the plane at all (I don’t think I got more than 6 hours of sleep over the 3 days of traveling), so I spent a lot of my time reading and looking out the window. The flight attendants asked us to close our window shades at night, but sometimes I’d peek out to see what was below. I did this the first night as we were flying over the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between Canada and Greenland, and audibly gasped at how beautiful it was. It must have been past midnight back home, so most people around me were sleeping, and I was almost worried my excitement woke some of them. Stars like I’ve never seen them before, strewn across the sky. The next night, I watched the stars over the Sahara Desert. Honestly, the brutality of traveling was made worth it just for seeing those stars. And I can’t even get started talking about the clouds. I will say this, though: it was funny to me, noticing how different the stars looked going over the different regions. Over Ireland, at sunrise, they were perfect little white clouds turned pink and gold in the light. Over Belgium, little dots of clouds made perfectly straight lines as far as you could see. Over Africa, huge greyish white blankets rolling over one another, covering the land. One of my favorite experiences about flying is the moment you pass through and above the cloud line- the moment when the cloud horizon is right outside your window, in every direction.

Our apartment is nice. We have a big kitchen, living room/dining room, two bedrooms (both shared between 2 people), 2 bathrooms, and a porch that overlooks the ocean from the 4^th floor. My roommate is named Nicole, who grew up in New Jersey but now goes to school at Wake Forest. She’s awesome, and makes me laugh. Our roommates in the 2^nd room are two girls from Auburn, Mary Claire and Katherine, who are, I think, two of the sweetest girls I’ve met in my life.

The only reason I talk about all this- the “inconvenient pain” that traveling was, how beautiful our apartment is, and so on- is to create a foundation to be able to relay the guilt and humility I feel today for having these petty thoughts and concerns, to whatever degree that I did.

Today in class, we discussed an article called “The Mindful Traveler” that put a lot of different elements of traveling abroad in a new light for me. We also heard from the most amazing panel of 4 locals about living during the apartheid. I feel really strongly about so many of the experiences we’ve had just in these last two days, and I want to do their stories justice. But- as if you weren’t sick of me saying it by now, if you’ve stuck it out reading this whole thing- I’ll have to discuss all of this in my next post. Be on the look out by Friday evening (for you), at the earliest.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table now, listening to “Roslyn” by Bon Iver, trying to crank this post out before it gets any later- it is now almost 2am for me. I spent most of the evening tonight walking on the beach with two new friends, Leah and Kelsey We had a really great conversation mostly about education reform while sitting on a concrete pier that jutted right out into the waves about two feet above sea level, a little walk away from our apartment building. It was inspiring, and I already feel very close to those two girls, who are both incredibly kind and smart people. When I got back, my three roommates and I hung around our kitchen table, talking for over two hours about everything from childhood broken bones to experiences today with local South Africans to Greek life at school. Tomorrow, we’re hearing from a guest speaker, discussing our strengths and values, and I’ve heard rumors about a hike.

My heart is with you all, M.