The Journey

So I'm sure that many of you out there are curious about the whole journey to getting to South Africa. Many of you may be curious at how one gets to this place and I'm going to give you the details. If you thought "he can't be driving to Africa," "taking a boat would take much too long," or "well he's not really in that great of shape to swim there," then you are right. I will be flying there by plane!

My journey actually has already begun because as I type this I lye in a hotel room in Newton, Massachusetts. Since I reside from Lebanon, New Jersey, I already have put some miles behind me. My flight leaves at 2 later this afternoon from Logan Airport. From Logan I then go to Dulles Airport in DC and switch planes. My flight then heads for Johannesburg, South Africa. This takes a little bit under 18 hours with a pit stop in Senegal to refuel. This should be a very interesting test of patience since I am currently feeling my excitement surging more and more. Then in Johannesburg I once again switch planes and head for Cape Town. All and all this whole ordeal will be about 25 hours from the time I leave Boston until the time I touch down in Cape Town. After we land there, we gather our things, jump into some AIFS vans, and make the final 45 minute ride to Stellenbosch arriving sometime just after midnight South African time Monday night. This will be quite the journey, but I'm pretty confident it will be worth it.

You may be thinking "whoa you are gonna just pass out when you get there!" and that I'm sure will happen very quickly, but not before one last task. After all this travel and everything, when we finally arrive on campus we will all be standing around, exhausted and perhaps delirious, and then they say "Okay pick a roommate." We then need to look around and arbitrarily choose someone at random who we think we like for the next 4 and a half months. This I'm sure will be a wonderful awkward experience and will hopefully be kind of funny. I mean I'm not too worried because I've been judging people for years, so I'm very practiced. I never get a person wrong on my first judgement like Tim Sharek is a meathead because he was wearing sneakers during the summer when i first met him, and Brian Ahern is an attention hungry jerk because he was wearing his tye dye Kool Aid hat the first time I saw him... or wait maybe I'm not that good at judging people? I guess we will just have to wait to find out, but keep in mind those judgements were all made freshman year and I've spent hours in Alliot honing these skills over the past 2 and a half years. I'm practically pro at this point.

Stay tuned to find out how all of this goes and I will try to keep you up to date on my arrival and overall success of this travel.

Note: Tim is no meat head, but a very intelligent, nice, and silly guy that I love dearly. Brian is not an attention hungry jerk, but a fairly humble, good guy and solid colored hat wearer who I have warm feelings towards.