A Long Day

I wasn’t able to get on the computer yesterday or the day before because it was such a long day that all ran together. We had some good meetings in DC and got a nice base layer of information about South Africa. However, I couldn’t stop thinking that while this was great, I wasn’t going to have a real feel for the place till we arrived.

We headed out to Dulles Airport in the early afternoon. We were well early for the flight, but we needed to eat lunch and one of the members of our delegation was flying out on an earlier flight. It was a good chance for the group to spend some more time getting to know each other.

The flight to Amsterdam left about 5:30 PM and we chased the sun around the Earth to the Netherlands. It did get dark for a few hours on the plane, but the sun we peaking up before you knew it. We arrived in Amsterdam at 7:30 AM the next day. In actual Billings time that was around 11:30 PM, my usual bed time. We had some breakfast in a nice Irish Pub in the airport and then waited to board the flight to Johannesburg. There were lots of people going to Jo-burg and, for some unknown reason, we had to go through a separate security line.

I’ve had a good book to read while I was on the plane. It is “Kaffir” and it is a memoir of a gentleman that grew up under apartheid. It is hard to believe how bad the conditions were during that time and the book was a great primer on the visit we would later make to the museum on apartheid.

Let me just say that before I got on the plane to Jo-burg, my butt was pretty numb. I’m pretty sure I left my butt somewhere over Africa, because I could not feel it when I got off the plane. I was planning on not sleeping so that I would go to sleep when we finally arrived. But I was doing the head bobs of sleep and couldn’t stop myself from going to sleep on the plane. It turned out to be the best thing. I was still tired when we got here, had a good nights sleep and I haven’t felt any ill effects of jet lag.

I probably slept the first half of the flight. I did get a chance to get up and walk around when we were flying over the Sahara Desert. It was really great to look out and view the desert from up high. Since we were headed to the South Hemisphere and winter, it did get dark pretty early on the flight. I think it was dark by 6 PM. When we did land, so did the Air France flight and it took forever to get through passport control. One of our delegates didn’t have a bag arrive, so it took quite some time to get out of the airport.

We arrived at a great hotel and it took quite a while to check in. Most everything we do takes quite a while, but that is just group dynamics.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to get on the Internet until now. I’m hoping that now that we are here, I will have much better access to the Internet. Sunday was spent at the Apartheid Museum and touring parts of Soweto. I will update that shortly.