Saturday Aug 4nd 2007

Saturday Aug 4nd 2007

(Ok so this s posting them backward, if i can't fix it just pay attention to the date)

In London they have these really neat posters in the walk ways. They are two posters that go together. Like on had a chili pepper and then its counterpart had a red high healed shoe. They put the two near each other and under the chili pepper it said “pain” and other the high healed shoe “pleasure” the it put them again and under the chili it said “pleasure” and under the shoe “pain.” there were tons of different ones all about how we all see the world differently. I really liked them. So in London we had to switch terminals. So we exited the ramp thing and saw the line we were supposed to be in to go through security and started following it to find the end. And we walked and we walked and we walked, past 3 or 4 moving sidewalks that weren’t moving, and about what I would guess was a quarter mile later we found the end of the line. The people kept going by and asking for people whose flight was leaving soon and pulled them to the front. They said this was unusual but that there was nothing wrong it was just that busy.

One thing about London is that you are allowed one carry one. And they mean it. If you have a blanket that is your carry on, if you have the smallest purse ever, that is your carry one. This was a slight issue for us because we were bringing blankets for all the older kids at Tumaini and Kate (who is incredibly wonderful) packed all she could, she even packed everything she needed in a carry on and used both her checked luggage for blankets, but there we two that couldn’t fit, so we had to jam them into our carry ons, it took some effort moving things around but worked ok. When we finally made it to the front of the line (or so we thought) we found ourselves instead in a room where the lines snaked all around, it reminded me of Disney world. But we did get through and we found ourselves some food. It was funny I walked by one place and say people eating breakfast and thought that was odd until I remembered that it was not night it was like 6 in the morning.

We walked to our gate to eat our food because we didn’t have a ton of time. I was filling up my water bottle at the drinking fountain (which I did quite often, in fact I think I win the award for the most hydrated which can be evidenced by how much I peed) anyways, I was filling up my water bottle and a nice man gave me one of his extra bottle of water (yes it was sealed) because he’s gotten it buy one get one free. The other cool thing was the water said that ll the proceeds from purchases go to build wells for clean water in Africa.

Our plane ride to Nairobi was Ok, I was able to sleep about 3 hours. The bad thing was the person in front of me put their seat all the way back out 10 minutes into the flight and left it there the entire time, even when eating. Our flight was about 8 hours. I had wanted to look down over the Mediterranean but ended up sleeping during that time. I did however make sure I was up for both meals J the first one was quite disappointing though, they asked me if I wanted chicken or beef, I really should have asked more questions but I said chicken and it ended up being curry chicken, I really don’t like curry. But there was a really cool strawberry cheese cake for desert.

I did get to look down at the Sahara desert which was quite cool. And I got to see the Nile a bit before it got cloudy. Unfortunately along with the clouds came the turbulence. It wasn’t so bad except for once. And I would describe that turbulence as “thank goodness I had my seatbelt on/are we going to die.” I really hope I never experience that on a flight again.

On the approach to Nairobi it was night time (our arrival was 8:45) I was really surprised how few lights there were. I saw no lights except the actual city and even then not near as bright as one of our cities, in fact it kind of sneaked up on you. We landed uneventfully but the taxiing took a long time because something about an immobile plane (use your imagination about how that happened) on the strip we were supposed to land on so we used a different one and had to be towed to the gate. No matter the reason, there is just something that makes you uneasy about your plane being towed.

When we got to the airport we found immigration and as was our custom picked the slowest line. The immigration guy was very nice though. We all went to get carts and then Joe and I stood by them and the other three went to collect luggage. We were a little nervous that our luggage would make all the switches. But they all came YEA!!! When we left the airport we saw Davis right away which was good, we were a little nervous about that because 1 it was night and 2 Anne had said that there are often kids who want to take your luggage to where you need it and they are very forceful. David was there with his Godmother Miriam (whose house we were staying at), he daughter Joy and his friend Wash. We got all our stuff and us in two cars. I road with Joy (she’s 13), Kate and then Wash drove. Wash is 21ish, He’s an architecture student. He had to go 6 years for that and said that he really likes the art part of it.

Driving in Kenya is an adventure. From what I can gather people drive in the middle until there is a reason not to. They are also crazy drivers. I was glad to be with Wash, he was a quite cautious driver. we got to Miriam’s and there we met Roselyn and Joshua, David’s brother and sister, he had another sister Janet who wasn’t’ there. There was also Grace who was the house keeper. Prepared for us was chapos (like homemade tortillas), stew, fresh oranges and rice. Miriam told us about herself (I’ll write about that later, this is getting long). And we went to bed that night and slept very well but we didn’t get to bed until after 12 and got up for church at 7 so we were quite tired. I think it took us in all about 30 hours to get there.