Return(ing)

Greetings from Accra!

So this is the New Year... I feel so blessed to be back in Ghana, even though it is intensely hot, and though I told everyone I talked to that I would be making my return in the dry season, it is humid enough to make showering nearly worthless. At least the rain and subsequent flooding gutter situation I witnessed often two years ago hasn't happened yet.

So the return trip. My lovely parents agreed to drive me to the airport at 3am the day after Christmas, to make my 6:25 flight into New York. My flight was uneventful except for the lack of food served and my intense hunger pains. The landing was pretty intense as New York was quite windy and rainy, but we got there alive.

I then proceeded to get lost for about 30 minutes in the JFK airport trying to find baggage claim. That place is fucking huge. It was ridiculous. Like an idiot I just followed people from my flight instead of signs and ended up in the international terminals baggage claim, and had to leave the airport and walk around it looking for my correct terminal. Super ridiculous and definitely led me to some "am I really this country??" self-questioning.

Moving on. Bianca, Elena's friend who also went to San Francisco State and who now lives in Brooklyn was nice enough to come meet me at the airport and keep me company while we waited for Elena's flight from Denver which was delayed and also later than mine in the first place. Eventually, Elena arrived and we got her bag and stepped out into the cold and rainy New York night. Our flight to Accra wasn't leaving for about a day-and-a-half so Bianca was kind enough to let us stay with her and play tour guide for us during our visit.

I really hope I can spend time in New York some time. The city was really fun, and I really liked Brooklyn. I think I may be growing out of my desire to live in big cities permanently, however there is something so satisfying about just walking and wandering through busy streets, letting street lights pick your route. New Yorkers were also surprisingly kind, breaking down my "New Yorkers are mean and rude" bias.

So Elena and I leave our warm clothes and jackets, as well as our close-toed shoes with Bianca, and step out into a frigid Brooklyn afternoon to grab our subway to the airport. We stood on the open-air platform shivering, waiting for the J train for a good 20 minutes before we realize that the J doesn't come to this stop. What country bumpkins we had become! We figure it out; no big deal--just extra time in the cold. Woooo.

We finally make it the airport, and find our terminal with little problems, and then find our airline to see that apparently everyone in the world has decided to fly Egypt Air to Cairo two days after Christmas. The line was at least 100 people long, and everyone had stacks of luggage to check. Yay! Actually, we were lucky and were waived into the Business Class line because we were only checking one small suitcase (and I also suspect, because we are white--yes! the racial analysis begins here!) and so we were at our gate with time to spare.

It was here that I had my very first encounter with doxycycline the antibiotic I will be taking for the duration of my trip to keep me from getting malaria. The pills are a good 3 cm long and bright blue--basically they look like poison. They also kind of act like poison--making me incredibly nauseous if I don't take them on the emptiest of empty stomachs and eating something within about 10 minutes. Irritating.

So, fast forwarding a little. The flight to Cairo, where we would grab a flight to Accra was 10 hours of cramped legs and ridiculously bad movies (Ice Age 3 (ugg) something with Jessica Biel as a blond race car driver. (terrible) and something about a Scottish Stone? I don't know (also bad.)

We arrived in Cairo at about 12pm and set about our plans to get an Egyptian passport stamp and go into the city to get a falafel. We paid $15 for an Egyptian visa, and then asked the guy who changed our American dollars into Egyptian pounds where we should go to get a Falafel in 3 hours or less (we had a 6 hour layover, but didn't want to be late to an international flight) and he wrote something down in Arabic to show to a bus driver and we thanked him and left.

It turned out that whatever he had written down (Arabic just looks like pretty squiggles to me...) was far, far away from the airport and the center of Cairo in general, and so we were told by another airport employee to take a bus into the city center. Unfortunately, though English is one of Egypt's official languages, it is not widely spoken. So, no one could tell us which bus to take for quite some time, and then we found it was quite a long trip into the city center, where of course we would be faced with the whole "can you please tell me exactly where to go and how to get there?" thing we were currently doing very unsuccessfully. We swallowed our pride (and our wallets) and paid a taxi to take us to a falafel stand, wait for us, and bring us back to the airport. It was totally worth that shiny Egyptian visa in my passport.

I love you.