Alright, let's do this!

Well... I'm in the Charlotte airport- Step 1 in a 40ish hour itinerary. I'm as ready as I think I'm going to be, thanks to a meticulously kept googledoc I've had for the past few months. I was hoping to get a mani/pedi before I left (one last bit of developed country-ness) but, of course, I spent all day running around trying to do last minute errands. I have a 12 hour layover in Dubai though, so maybe I'll get one there. Meanwhile, I have an 8 hour layover at JFK in New York, so I'm going to go into the city and have dinner with the fam, including my cousin's month old baby, Ezra!

For the past few days the butterflies in my stomach have been going CRAZY but right now I'm actually feeling pretty calm. I really like flying, especially on long flights where they have all the movies to watch. I'm flying Emirates airlines, which seems like it's going to be pretty nice. When I went to select my meal option, I had like 10 choices including vegetarian, lacto-ovo vegetarian, low calorie, low sodium, Muslim, Jain, and Kosher. Speaking of which, I have a layover in Addis Ababa and Ethiopian food is my favorite cuisine in the world so I am not-so-secretly hoping there is a traditional restaurant in the airport so I can compare authentic to American. Hmmmm. We'll see.

There are going to be one or two other people from my program on my flight, so it'll be nice to show up in Uganda already knowing some people. It turns out that most people are getting in the day before we are supposed to get there because the flights were a lot easier. I guess they are just----

side note. My computer just randomly shut off with no warning. Luckily blogspot is smart enough to autosave drafts as I type. This why macs are infinitely superior to pcs. I got a netbook for this trip so hopefully it will start behaving. If not... well... I guess there's not much I can do, so fingers crossed---

Anyways, back to where I was. I guess the other people on my program are going to just find a hotel to stay in overnight before they meet up with the group. This is making me pretty intimidated cuz no way would I ever show up alone in a developing country that I've never been to. From the little blurbs people have been emailing out about themselves, everyone seems pretty cool though. Maybe crazy though, cuz seriously, who studies abroad in Uganda??? You've gotta be crazy to do that! I'm really glad I'm going and I wouldn't want to be going anywhere else, but I'm thinking there are going to be a lot of times this semester when I'm really jealous of your hot showers and lack of the need for mosquito netting around your bed.

Ok. That's all for now. More later. I'm hoping to update twice a week-ish while I'm abroad. I have my blackberry with me so I get email and I can email in short blogs too. One thing that I ask, pleeeeeaseeee comment every once and a while on my blog so I believe anybody besides my parents (no offense mom and dad) is reading it.

See you in a few months!
Lily

p.s. Hopefully the bandwidth in Uganda will be good enough that I can upload my pictures so that little strip at the top of the blog will have pictures that are relevant to Uganda instead of just my test album of randomly selected pictures from my computer.