My parents dropped me off at Dulles (airport) around 3:30? for my 6pm flight. The airport was crazy and the Air France lady where I checked in tried to convince me that my daypack and my rucksack counted as two large carryon items and that one would have to be checked because you can only carryon one large item and one personal item. I nicely pointed out that everyone else and their mom was checking in with bigass suitcases as their larger item and smaller suitcases as their personal item, and that, combined, my backpacks were smaller than most peoples’ “personal item.” The lady was having none of it, telling me that it is Air France’s policy. Exasperated (and sleep deprived), I asked if I put the contents of my backpack in a duffel bag (that I was checking) and the duffel bag’s contents in my backpack , then checked the backpack and carried on the duffel bag, whether that would be permitted. She explained that that was fine, even though the duffel bag is a good deal bigger than my backpack. At that point I was like “this is moronic” (phrased differently) and the lady called over a manager who took one look at my stuff and told me it was fine. Take that, Air France lady.
Security was crazy but I befriended a charming guy from London who was going home. He told me to be careful in Africa because some of the cities there are “dodgy.” Love it. After making it through security, I waltzed over to my plane, which then had delayed boarding. I made it onto the plane which then had a delayed take off (and a strange Dutch man in the seat next to me, who I may have befriended?). Still, better than my flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi, which sat on the tarmac for three hours. Lovely lady from Zambia was sitting next to me on this flight, and she told me that she was going back to visit her kids in Zambia but that she worked in Finland but would soon be in Tanzania with her boyfriend to go scuba diving. The flight to Nairobi and the airport in Nairobi were full of missionaries. Everyone seemed to be going on a mission and the row in front of me on the plane was talking church smacktalk about whose church was better (they were also wearing fabulous safari hats which makes me feel marginally better about the amazingly ugly hat my mom got me).
The lines to go through passport control / get a visa took forever and my bags were waiting, as was the driver that Hillary sent to pick me up. The driver, James, was psyched that he was the first Kenyan I had properly met and asked me to invite him to my college graduation. He told me a little about the city, but sadly it was nearly midnight and I couldn’t see a thing except the drivers we nearly hit (or that nearly hit us). Nairobi is not a city I’d like to drive in.
Got to the hotel, met Annie (the other undergrad doing research here with Hillary and Doug), checked in with Hillary and Doug, and crawled into bed. The city was crazy loud (I was wearing earplugs but I think there was a party going on in the street outside our window) so I only think I slept for an hour or two. Around 4:30am, I gave up on sleeping, got up, showered, and started shuffling things around in my suitcases. I felt bad for making noise (my mom puts everything that might even think about leaking in plastic bags, and, as such, my suitcase tends to crinkle), but I was nothing compared to the noise of Nairobi. As it turns out, Annie was laying in bed awake, too.
And on a parting note, mosquito nets make you feel like you’re a princess in bed:
