Day 1: Goodbye Home Sweet Home. Hello South Africa!

Pretoria, South Africa

 

Today was exhausting, physically and emotionally.  I rode to the airport with my family and Alec and said goodbye to them all one last time before going through security.  anyone who knows me knows I cried A LOT.  Even though I've been preparing for this day for months, say bye was harder than I thought.

I went through security and found my gate, it was only 4:15 and my flight wasn't until 7:20.  This is when I got really impatient and I really just wanted to board the plane and start my journey.  Three hours felt more like three days.  Finally the rest of the girls showed up and we boarded the plane.  The first flight was about 7 hours to Amsterdam and we got dinner and breakfast.  Dinner was pasta (yuck) and breakfast was some weird egg and mayonnaise sandwich (double yuck).  Thanks to benedryl, I slept through most the flight.

The Amsterdam airport was beautiful, I wish we could've spent longer there.  It was filled with tons of cool shops and there were flowers everywhere.  But, our layover was only 75 minutes and we had to go through security again, so there wasn't any time to stop. 

The next flight was from amsterdam and Johannesburg and it was 11 hours!!  By far the longest flight I ever want to be on.  They served us lunch, a snack, and dinner, all of which were unedible, but I expected that.  I slept through the snack, but I kinda heard them asking if people wanted a tuna or cheese sandwich, and decided it wasn't worth waking up for.  The dinner was pizza, and it was the most terrible thing I've ever tasted, ughhhh.  I was nice and comfortable on the plane watching TV, but then they broke.  So, I popped another benedryl and went back to sleep for the rest of the flight.

After we went through customs, we went to our hotel.  On the way we passed a guy openly drinking a beer while he was driving!!  that scared me, and we asked our driver if there was a law against that here, but we didn't get a clear answer.  We had to go through two gated areas to get to our rooms, which I would say is somewhere between Holiday Inn and Motel 6.  The weirdest part was that there was no peephole to see who was knocking on our door and thw shower flooded our bathroom :(

I can already tell this will be very different than what i'm used to and it will take a lot of adjusting.  But, I'm happy to be here even though I miss everyone from home very much.

Hopefully tomorrow I will get to an internet cafe tomorrow and we be able to update again!
Love you guys!
Kelsey