The Eagle Has Landed

*** sorry it took so long for us to write. We were in transit for two days, and then we had to figure out the internet, which is a beast!

After Susan (Ayla’s mom) left a big, smudgy, jewish lipstick kiss on her cheek, we left Austin at 11:40am Saturday, and arrived in Johannesburg 5:30pm Sunday. We flew South African Air, and developed a love/hate relationship with it. Reasons we love it: pull out cup holders (don’t have to pull the whole tray down), they have gluten free meals!!, highly encouraged seat exercises for circulation, and everyone in economy gets pillow, blanket, personal tv with a bagillion movies. Reasons we hate it: we got crop dusted with air freshner when we stopped in Senegal for re-fueling, and they didn’t restock the toilet paper (with over 300 people on the flight).

When we arrived in jo-burg people seemed super friendly and helpful, until they finished carting our luggage (we couldn’t say no, they just grabbed it from us) and demanded a $20 American dollar tip. Then we met some cool people, until we found out they were oilers and proudly promoting their part in the demise of whales. But they bought us dinner so we cant complain. But then again they did call us in the middle of the night and wake us up to ask if we wanted to go to a casino (we had told them that we were gonna pass out bc we didn’t sleep on the 22 hour flight). And randomly the Dutch National Soccer team was at our hotel- Hottie McHottersons.

The next morning we went back to the airport to meet our ride to Botshabelo. In the airport we were super productive and got our internet straightened out (although it is suuuper complicated and we had to write down a page of instructions- something about converting cell phone minutes into internet air time). Then we met Sue (picture friendly chatty smoker wrinkly grandma that is very blond and blue eyed, and talked a lot about things that piss her off) and had an adventure getting back to botshabelo (bc we had to run some errands- Sue style).

South Africa is super lush, tons of greenery and amazing bright flowers (we learned form the oilers who were from all over the world that Americans say “amazing” way too much). We have only met a few people so far, but somehow Ilene has memorized everyone’s name from the documentary about Botshabelo called “Angels in the Dust.” We went grocery shopping and are gonna watch the golden globes tonight (sounds American, but we are going to be surrounded by tons of Botshabelo kids crawling on us and running away from bugs).

Ayla and Ilene