Flight In & First Impressions

I'm here!!!!! So hard to believe, but Bethany and I (as well as all of our luggage - thanks to those who prayed specifically for that) are safely in South Africa. Originally I thought that the flight was literally 22 hours, but I was surprised to learn that we were really only in the air a total of 17 hours because we lost 7 due to the time change. It was weird to eat breakfast on the plane, then eat supper about three hours later, haha.

Leaving my family at the airport in Chicago was pretty tough, but I managed to hold in MOST of my tears. My cousin Dyanna and I are going to try to get the code to unlock my cell phone, as it will not do anything over here, and is frustrating because all I was able to do was send a quick text to my family from my Uncle's phone to let them know we made it here. (By the way, mom, I can't remember your new email address, so if you read this, please email me:).

So the plane ride wasn't too bad - Bethany and I had seats next to each other both times, which was really nice because there were some very, um lets just say, interesting people on the plane. They searched my purse/bag at the airport and dumped everything out of it because they said I had too many books in it, hah. Our flight from Chicago was a little delayed, so we had to grab our stuff and RUN through the airport in Atlanta to make it for our next flight, which was running right on time, of course. We made it just as they were starting to board! The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful.

My Aunt, Uncle, and cousins met us at the Johannasburg airport, then we drove in their kombi (Sotho for big van) north for about three hours to their house in Polokwane. I woke up at about four thirty this morning, probably due to the time change, and have no signs of jet lag - so far....

I'll have to take some pictures of their yard and house to post them here. The land is beautiful in it's own way. Definitely not what I expected, but still beautiful. Hilly, and you could even say mountainous in some places, with very short trees and very tall grass, blended together against a back drop of bluish grey mountains and a bright blue sky. I saw some corn on the way home from the airport (which didn't stress me out, Reid;), which I wasn't expecting either. The weather isn't humid really, just overwhelmingly hot, as if you're sitting too close to a fireplace.

I've got to finish this too long already post & go do something worth writing about in my next post, so bye for now:)