Hello All!

Well I have made it to Cape Town alive and (mostly) well. After some 30 hours of travelling, I am exhausted, but still excited. Some highlights and lowlights of my trip:

My flight from PDX to JFK was pretty good. I wish I could have slept more, but all went well. JFK was definitely interesting. I'm glad that I had a four and a half hour layover because it took me over an hour to figure out how to get to the terminal I would be departing from and another half an hour to wait in line for McDonald's breakfast since I didn't want to spend $10 on a mediocre sandwich. I promptly fell asleep for about an hour hugging my luggage. I then went to go through security just to find out that I needed a different boarding pass than the one given to me in Portland (I'm pretty sure this is common knowledge in the flying world considering the woman looked at me like an idiot, but I had no idea. I'll blame it on the five hours of sleep over 48 hours. :p) So I ran back upstairs with 10 minutes to go until boarding started, got the correct boarding pass (which looked EXACTLY the same to me) and ran back to security. By the grace of God I got placed into the shortest line and made it to the gate only 10 minutes after they had opened it. Now, as many of you already know, I wasn't able to pick my seats for my trip and was therefore placed into a middle seat on all flights. The plane from JFK to JNB was huge: 75 rows and eight seats across (in a 2-4-2 formation). I was assigned a seat in the middle of row 74, which happened to only have three seats in the center aisle. And then…there was no one in the seat to my right when they announced that all passengers had boarded! So I scooted over and spent the flight taking turns sharing the middle seat with the guy on my left as we both stretched during our sleep on the fourteen-hour flight. I was actually able to sleep a decent amount…about seven hours in all. Arriving in Johannesburg was quick and painless. Surprisingly I didn't have to fill out any paperwork or anything. They just scanned and stamped my passport and sent me on through (and yes, I did check to make sure they issued me a 90-day visa). From JNB to Cape Town everything went fine. Exhaustion was starting to hit me. One of the ladies from VACorps (the organization that set up my housing and offers support while I'm here) picked me up from the airport. We came to the house and I was introduced to some of my housemates. I was given a quick tour of the neighborhood, shown how to buy electricity, and unpacked. I have slept a lot the past couple of days and hopefully will be over my jetlag by Monday for my introduction to my supervisor. I will post again in a few more days.

Love and miss you all back home.

Brianna

p.s. The photo isn't very great, but that was the view coming into New York from the plane.