Wednesday, October 01, 2008

International Travel, Straight Ahead!

Now that I've been able to do some real-life shopping (internet shopping from Cedarville is much better...less distracting from the privacy of your own pc) in the big city of South Bend, got some pre-travel travel out of the way, and almost have the kinks of getting ready taken care of, it really feels like I'll be in Tanzania next weekend. Less than 2 weeks. 9 days (if no delays from London...)

If you can really feel like you're actually going to be in a place, a city, a continent, you've never been before...

I wonder how it will feel to transfer from connectedness online to my many friends (gotta love the facebook phenomenon) into one-person connectedness in the flesh...and this in a culture whose language I do not speak, customs I do not know, and land I have not seen before. Poor Amber! I'll be overwhelming her with my news from the states, my fast English-speaking, and my own overwhelmedness by it all. I do hope that our excitement in seeing one another after 27 months' absence tempers the storms.

Yeah, I know, you may say, "Sarah, how can someone be overwhelmed by you? You're such a calming person..." to which I can only raise my shoulders and smirk. You got me there. And I guess Amber will be the better judge in all this.

So, you may wonder about some of the specifics...well without going into much detail for those of you stalkers out there, I'll be at site with Amber in southwest Africa for about 4 weeks, then traveling a bit with Katherine (we've heard of one another and talked via email but not met...) including Zanzibar for a couple weeks; then we'll fly to Morocco for Thanksgiving with some friends that I don't know yet...after that the details get sketchy for me, but tentatively we'll visit a friend or two of mine from Cedar as we go through Spain and France, as well as a monastery; finishing up the trip with some time in Luxembourg with a friend of Amber's. Who knows, we might hit up my sister city Wiesloch while we're at it...or maybe just Heidelberg?

Let the jealousy continue...I'll put up pictures for you when I can :)


I leave you with a pre-travel travel pic - at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where Erica and I saw Hazel Dickens tell some stories with spunk :)
Kennedy Center

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Correction: Southwest Tanzania, in East Africa. Overwhelmed? You can try your best. We'll see about that. Be warned- I've been telling people that you look like me. So hope you can live up to the very, very high expectations they no doubt have. :)

Sarahhh said...

oh dear.

well for the record i've been saying it right to people...east africa, south of kenya, giving the visual, telling 'em we'll be in the south west of TZ...

it's lookalike time!