Journal entry (edited)
My day stared early in Paris. Not sleeping last night I kept waking up thinking I had overslept. My alarm was set to go off at 440am to catch the 5am shuttle to the airport. I woke up at 1am, 2am, 230am, 3am, 310am, 320am, 340am.. you get the idea...
Finally I got up with my alarm, took a very fast shower and grabbed my bags and checked out of the hotel. I got the 5am bus and went to check in at the airport. The agent gave me a seat right away so I was set to go for my 725am flight. Just had a LOT of time to kill. Luckily the agent put me near the front so I could make my tight connection in Amsterdam.
The lady at the transfer desk only checked me in as far as Kilimanjaro, not all the way to Dar es Saalam. So when I went to check in my bag they had to do some extra finesse on my ticket.
I was told the flight was wide open both up front and in the back so I had hopes of riding first class.. XXX nope.. coach seat, window in the back.. but I got on!
Luckily I was so tired I passed out even before take off and woke up in the skies. I slept on and off on the flight to Kilimanjaro. They passed out a postcard to each person for some promotion that KLM was having with the Netherlands.
We landed in Kilimanjaro, most people deplaned and I got to chat with the Flight Attendants until the plane reloaded.. Luckily it was only a 45 minute flight on to Dar.
I deplaned, paid my 100 usd visa, and then exited to find the Worthens there waiting for me.. It was so nice to see a friendly face that far away from home!
The drive back to their place was fairly uneventful and it was almost midnight. We still stayed up chatting for quite sometime until we were all nodding off.
The next morning we had a delicious breakfast of fresh bananas and pineapple. SO yummy!
I went to music class with the Worthens, they were teaching the basics about how to lead music. It was great to see the people so interested.
Pam and Bruce are a hoot! Bruce talks to the other drivers in the cars like they can hear him. I just had to sit back and laugh. Its no wonder these two are such good friends with Mom and Dad.
Sunday was another full day of conference, again I kept falling asleep. I went in to hear it in swahili as the room for english was jam packed. Swahili is a language that has tones from a bunch of different languages. I heard Portuguese, Dutch and other one I couldn't identify.
We had planned to go to Zanzibar the next day on the ferry but it turns out with the ferry schedule we would not have had enough time to explore it, so we decided to drive the 40kms up to Bagomoyo.
Tanzania/Dar is a crazy place but beautiful none the less.
