Back in Action

Trip home for 9 days to the United States (four of which were flying.)

Things I forgot about / appreciated / or saw in a new way about the US:

• texting with t9word.  amazing
• grocery stores that are organized and clean
• traffic lights that people obey
• nobody honks that much.  in africa, a honk can also mean hello, we are family
• cars that are spotless.  people don’t mind dents over here as long as it works.
• roads without potholes = less adventure
• fancy dinners
• digging through old clothes in the attic i hadn’t seen in years
• back in the halls of my highschool seeing old teachers as peers with more experience, not just teachers
• the mac store (probably the supercomputer HQ that runs the world)
• outdoor malls
• arbys, subway, and chipotle
• everything’s amazing but nobody notices
• today show with crazy feminists talking about how less people are getting married these days and how much better that is?  you should forget about men for the sake of your careers, sleep around til you die.  how deluded are we?

  Visceral things about Africa when you land:

• the heat.  no seasons (for temperature)
• micro-advantages .  taxi drivers and bodas and cars will do anything to get ahead.  same at the checkout counter
• people boarding public transport with large poultry (a turkey this time, which I bought)
• goats walking into your house when you leave the door open
• strapping a week’s worth of groceries to the back of a motorcycle
• not caring about power outages
• eating with your hands
• people go out of their way for you when you don’t know them
• women kneel in front of you when they serve you food
• ant invasions
• floods of mud-water (up to 2 feet recently in Jinja)