Where to begin??? This past weekend was very exciting to say the least! We left for Kampala which is the capital of Uganda early Thursday morning and took our first form of public transportation. The bus ride was about 4 hours long, but it wasn't too bad. We stopped a couple times along the way to drop people off and pick new people up. We stayed at a convent right behind the US Embassy so rest assured we were in a good area of town. For those of you who don't know, the city of Kampala is HUGE!!! I usually don't get claustrophobic, but just seeing the massive crowds on the street was enough to make me feel uncomfortable.

We were lucky enough to be traveling with a couple of our friends, Becky and Greg. Greg was the one who dislocated his shoulder a couple weeks back, and Becky is a Peace Corps volunteer. She's been here for going on two years, so she really knows the ins and outs of how everything runs around here. When we arrived in Kampala on Thursday, Becky took all of us to the Garden City mall and a nearby market to do some shopping. It was a beautiful day out and I really enjoyed walking around and getting a better look at the city. After our afternoon of shopping we headed back to the convent to freshen up before our night out! Of course, before every fun night out a good meal is required. So that's why we made two family size kraft macaroni and cheese dinners for the six of us. Let me just tell you all something.... it was seriously the best food I have had in weeks!!! There is just something so special about that little blue box of cheesy goodness!! After dinner we flagged down some boda bodas, which are small motorcycles and probably the most common form of transportation in Uganda, and took them to the bar where we were meeting Becky and Greg. I was so nervous to ride the boda boda, because the people here are crazy drivers!! But oh my gosh!! It was so much fun!!!!! Joy and I rode together and seriously had the time of our lives! After our exhilerating ride we finally arrived at Steak Out. It was a very nice place and we had a great time dancing and hanging out with each other. We didn't stay out too late on Thursday because we had another big day ahead of us.

We woke up on Friday and headed back in to the City. We decided to take boda bodas again because we had so much fun taking them the night before. However, this ride didn't turn out to be as good..... Joy and I ended up getting seperated from the other four girls. Our driver ended up not knowing where we wanted to go so he let us off in the middle of the city. At first we were pretty nervous because we didn't have the phone on us and well, we were lost in the capital city of Uganda. We decided to sit down and pull ourselves together. Joy had a map of the city on her, so we decided to start walking in the direction of where we were supposed to meet our friends. Along our way, we saw a Catholic church so we went inside to say a little prayer so that we could find our friends and then continued on our way. After about an hour of walking around, I had an idea! We knew right where Becky and Greg's hotel was because we stopped there the day before and we were pretty close by. So we headed straight there. We knew they wouldn't be there because we were supposed to be meeting up with them in a bit, but I thought we could at least get their phone number from the hotel. When we got there we asked the worker and she gave us their number and even let us use her phone to call them! We told her where we were and she told us where to meet them at. We headed straight there and after a couple nerveracking hours in the busy city we were finally reunited with everyone!! (See Mom and Dad, I really do have street smarts!!!)

After our hectic afternoon, we decided to go back and rest before we headed out to dinner. We were going to try a thai restaurant, but when we got there, we discovered that it had been turned into a steakhouse called The Barn. Never having had thai food before, I was pleased with this slight change in plans and enjoyed a nice fillet steak with garlic mashed potatoes!!! After dinner we headed to another one of Becky's favorite places in Kampala, Bubble O'Leary. It's an authentic Irish pub right in the middle of Kampala and it was a lot of fun. We didn't stay super late, because we were leaving at 6:30am the next morning and heading to Jinja for white water rafting on the Nile River!!!!!