Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 13 and 14

Day Thirteen

Although this was technically the day that we would be spending travelling back to Tokyo, our flight was booked so late (9pm) that we basically had another full day in Sapporo. Unfortunately, this day wasn't quite as well planned out as the previous one, so we mostly spend it just wandering. Really though, we could tell that we were getting to that part of the trip where we were burning out a bit, so that fit in pretty well with what we wanted to do. We spent a fair amount of time sitting in parks or in buildings, just because we were tired and couldn't think of anything better to do. One early morning highlight though was breakfast: we ate dango that we had picked up from the store the previous night. If you don't know why I'm so excited to eat dango, you've clearly never watched Clannad, but if you've seen it, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Dango are great, by the way. Very tasty.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 11 and 12

Day Eleven

We didn't do very much today, so let's spend some time talking about Japanese restaurants and why they're better than the ones in North America. The first thing that stands out is the hand towel they give you. Pretty much everywhere gives you something to clean your hands with, either an actual towel or just a wet wipe. Pretty nice when your hands are dirty from walking all day. The next cool thing is how a bunch of them put a button on your table that will call a waiter over whenever you want. This is particularly nice when ordering, because you don't feel preasured to decide what to get quickly before the staff come back. Plus, if you need something during the meal, you can just buzz them over and get it. So much easier than trying to catch their attention. But the best part of Japanese restaurants is probably the fact that they don't tip. This actually allows for several cool things, such as the fact that they often bring you the bill when they bring your food, which really expidites the process. It'd really be nice if more Western restaurants implemented these things.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 9 and 10

Day Nine

I don't think that I've yet mentioned how difficult it is to find a restaurant that's open for breakfast in Japan. I mean, they definitely exist, but they're shockingly rare. There are even coffee shops with "breakfast menus" that don't open until 11am. At this point, we've started to realise that it's sometimes better to just buy stuff from a convenience store instead of going to a sit-down place, which is actually a much better option then it sounds. In Japan, not only are there convenience stores on every other street corner, but they sell so much stuff; it's a bit ridiculous. Not only do they sell pre-packaged real meals and other stuff you may expect, but they even let you pay your bills and for your flights there and stuff. Crazy. Also crazy (and wonderful) is the number of vending machines you find everywhere. This has been a bit of an aside, but I really will miss having convenience stores and vending machines in large quantities like this when I go back to the US.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 5, 6, 7, and 8

Day Five

And thus begins the first new-city-every-day section of the trip. This was also the first day that we decided to activate our Japan Rail Passes. So, here's the thing. Foreigners can buy these passes that allow them unlimited travel on (basically) any rail line operated by JR, the nation-wide rail service that used to be owned by the government. The pass doesn't work on local subways owned by other companies, but for travel between cities there's no doubt that this is the best option. It was ~$260 for 7 days of unlimited travel, compared to ~$400 for the Shinkansen (bullet train) tickets alone. That's pretty solid.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 3 and 4

Day Three

The reason we keep waking up so early is the sunrise is so early here. Like, 4:30am early. What is that madness? Who designed this system? I do not approve. Anyhow, this resulted in me waking up by 6:30am again, which I think will be a pretty common theme during this trip.

Our plan for the day was to go and do the touristy things in the city of Tokyo, so we naturally started out by going to the heart of the city: Tokyo station. Apparently it's a popular tourist spot, as far as getting pictures of the building, and the architecture was pretty nice I suppose. It's also where we got breakfast, at one of the only shops that was open. Apparently not many places are open around 9am there. I had curry and rice, because I could, and it was pretty great; Japanese curry seems to be sweeter and far less spicy than Indian curry (at least for breakfast).

After breakfast we headed off to Nihonbashi, the ancient mercantile center of the city. The bridge there is famous for being where the major roads met, and it has some nice statues on it now. It was also featured prominently in the movie The Wings of the Kirin, a 2011 adaption of a Keigo Higashino novel (like the J-Drama Galileo). Good movie. It's also right next to the Ningyocho district of town, where the 2010 J-Drama series Shinzanmono was set (the movie is a sequel). We wandered around the area, looking at some of the local shrines, and slowly made our way to the Imperial Palace. On the way, we stumbled across the Currency Museum and its free admission, so popped in there. Japan apparently went on and off the gold standard multiple times, with the Yen being worth less gold each time they returned. Originally 1 Yen was worth 1.5 grams of gold!

A mythological Kirin, though with wings (which is apparently unusual).

The Imperial Palace gardens were closed (as we knew beforehand), so we went off to the district that was the number one place I wanted to visit: Akihabara. If you've heard of it, you know why. If you haven't, it's basically the geek mecca of Japan. Video games, anime, electronics; they have it all, and they love to show that off. Signs and posters for that stuff are everywhere. Our first stop was, believe it or not, an owl cafe. As in, a place where you can drink drinks while letting an owl perch on you, and you pet it. I had heard of cat cafes before, but the owl cafe thing was new to me. Definitely a unique experience. Afterwards, we went for lunch to the other type of cafe Akihabara is known for: the maid cafe. Thankfully(?) it was probably the most chill maid cafe ever created; the staff were in maid outfits, but they didn't call customers "master" or wear cat ears or anything incredibly awkward like that. It was basically just a normal cafe, but with an odd staff uniform. There were no pictures allowed inside either (which is probably a good thing). I got a rice omelet, and no, they didn't write anything on it. Like I said, super chill for a maid cafe.

Look at that little guy! His name is Cookie.

After the cafes came the shopping, which was the main reason I was hyped to go, of course. And yes, I did find the one thing I was looking for (and a few things I wasn't expecting, but couldn't turn down). I could spend the whole trip just browsing the stores there though, so we left as soon as I got what I wanted lest we waste too much time. There was apparently a cathedral of the Japanese Orthodox Church nearby, so we stopped in there just to see it and get a brief sit in. There was lots of standing and walking, let me tell you.

My haul: Miki is best idol, She and Her Cat, and of course the great Yang Wen-Li.

Using the opportunity to have a little meeting, we planned out the rest of our day and headed to Odaiba, the artificial island in Tokyo Bay, to see the Rainbow Bridge and other attractions. Like the 1:1 scale Gundum they have. And the replica Statue of Liberty. While waiting for sunset for the lights on the Rainbow Bridge to turn on, we chilled in the nearby mall, where we also ate dinner, and I got to eat a Japanese style crepe, where they fold it into an ice cream cone shape and fill it with whip cream. So good.

It's a Gundam!

The rainbow bridge failed to light up after dark, so we just gave up and headed to Tokyo Tower instead. It's sort of like the Eiffel Tower, but it's red and white. And in Tokyo. The observatories offered a pretty nice view of the city, and they even had a glass floor section of the 150m level. Not super large, but big enough to make me extremely nervous. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if the lights hadn't been shining right into my eyes from below, making it hard to focus. There's an extra fee to go to the 250m observatory, which we paid. It wasn't particularly impressive, though I don't really regret going up. The view was nearly identical to the lower one though. Maybe when the sun is out on a clear day it's better, but at night there was no real reason to bother.

Tokyo Tower, from the very base. A nice effect.

By the time we got back to our lodgings, 16 hours had passed from when we had headed out that morning. Also, some 30,000 steps had been walked, covering some 20.5km. I'm not sure I've ever walked that much in my entire life in a single day, and certainly not in the past several years. By the time this trip is done, I'll have met my quota for the next decade, because the next day was a massive count too.

Day Four

We decided the night before that we would head out of the city and go hiking on Mt. Mitake this day. We woke up (early, of course), got ready, and headed out, grabbing breakfast at a cafe on the way to the station. The train ride out there was about an hour and a half, and there was another half hour of travel by bus and funicular up to the start of the trails on the mountain, so it was already lunch time by the time we arrived. We grabbed packed lunches from the 7-Eleven (a much more reasonable thing to do in Japan, trust me; I had chicken cutlet and curry). The hiking was... intense, to say the least. Not all the time, but we pretty quickly went off the easier path and down the steep path that's terrifying to walk on because the slope is steep and there is no safety support, and it's all dirt and rock (some of which is loose)... Really it's standard for mountain hiking, but it still scares me to be on. We went down and up and down and up and down and up... several hundred stories by the end of it all. But the views pretty much made it worth it all. The waterfall nestled in the rocks was particularly nice, though we found out later on (as we climbed back up again) that farther up the stream a (presumably) Shinto ceremony was going on, with nearly naked people standing underneath another waterfall that fed into the one we first were at. It looked... unpleasant. That water was cold.

Not the biggest waterfall, but very pretty (and calming) in person.

The top of the mountain also has a large shrine that we visited. It was partly under construction, but there were sections that were still regular looking. The whole thing was pretty large and impressive. When we were finished with our hiking at the end of the day, we headed back down; rather than take the funicular again, we decided to walk down the mountain to the bus, which ended up being almost as tiring as the hiking. The road was long and steep and had an impressive number of switchbacks, but we made it down eventually. We caught the train back just on time (the next one would have been in an hour), and finally got to sit again for another hour and a half. The step total for today: over 20,000 across 16km (not counting vertical distance travelled).

A very small part of the shrine. Not even the ornate part.

If this trip has shown me anything thus far, it's reminded me of what I realised when in London: I love public transit that works. Everywhere I've lived so far hasn't had any really useful public transit system, due to being too small or just not caring enough because they're in North America and everyone expects to drive themselves everywhere all the time. But the transit in Tokyo and London is so comprehensive and so easy that it's not difficult to live without a car there. There are trains that will take you an hour and a half out to a little podunk station in a tiny town, and the one way trip cost under $10! Someday, I'd love to live in a city like those two, if only for the transit.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Days 1 and 2

Day Zero / One

I wasn't sure whether to call this days 1 and 2 or just day 1, because in some ways it felt like 2 short days, and in others it was like 1 really long day. Eventually I just settled on calling it 2 days of time, but only 1 day of trip.

A 2:30am start to any day is the height of stupidity, especially if you're accustomed to staying awake beyond then on a fairly regular basis. I would not recommend it under any circumstances if it can be avoided. Nevertheless, that's exactly what I ended up doing. Stupid 6:15am flight. Even worse is the fact that it was delayed until 7:30am, so it turned out that I didn't need to wake up that early after all! Not that they knew ahead of time, or even at the time of the flight. They delayed it once, then undelayed it, and then redelayed it! Apparently they thought they'd have to wait on a plane to get in, but then decided to use one that had been waiting there overnight, but didn't tell the crew, so saved no time in the long run. Kind of frustrating. Thankfully my layover was long enough that I was in no danger of missing fly connection, but it was still a pain.

I was flying United, so naturally that meant problems all the way. Not only was that first flight delayed, but the entertainment system for the LAX->NRT leg was broken, so half the time I couldn't watch any movies without them being rendered unwatchable by the constant freezing and skipping ahead. I did get about 2 hours of smooth video across the whole 11 hour flight, but most of that was spent rewatching parts that I had missed due to the skipping before. I realise it's kind of unreasonable to blame United for a computer error like that, and they are giving some compensation (in the form of a voucher for money off another flight), but that's just the sort of thing that I expect to happen when flying United.

Graduation Celebration in Japan: Intro

Man, it's been a long time since I've posted anything here. October, huh? And that was about something that I did the previous December. Wow. But as long as that's been, it's been even longer since I got to travel anywhere exciting. It'll be three years this June since I went to Russia, and I really haven't been anywhere since then. I mean, I've gone and graduated twice since then (most recently this past Thursday)! I'd say it's about time for another trip.

And so, we end up here: a Japan trip. Now, I've technically been to Japan before, but a) that was a long time ago (Christmas 2000), b) we really didn't go anywhere outside the airport except for our hotel, and c) goodness knows I'm a lot more interested in Japan now than I was then. So, when I heard that a group of my friends was going at around the same time as my graduation, I leapt at the chance.

The schedule is kind of frenetic in terms of traveling, since we wanted to visit a whole bunch of locations across the entire country. We're going to start out in Tokyo for a few days, before moving west and south, hitting up the big/important cities (i.e. Kyoto, Okasa, Hiroshima...). We'll go hiking on the island of Yakushima (part of the inspiration for Princess Mononoke, apparently), before booking it north all the way up to Sapporo to see the lilacs, and then return to Tokyo to head home. The whole thing will take 14 days (not as long as Kenya, but longer than England).

All that travel has kind of forced me to pack lighter than I ever have for a trip this long. I'm going to try to live out of just one carry-on sized backpack, which will definitely be an experience. Being an international flight, I've got 2 free checked bags, but I'm not going to get to use them! Kind of frustrating after paying for a bag so many times on domestic flights. Obviously, this also means that this isn't going to be a big shopping trip, but if I can at least get a copy of She and Her Cat -Everything Flows- (releasing at the same time that we arrive), I'll be content.

I leave tomorrow. Morning. Stupid early. It's gonna be great. I'm going to try to update this blog along the way whenever I can, as with previous trips, so that interested people can follow along. I honestly have no idea what the internet situation will be like though, or how much time I'll have to prepare a post, so we'll just do what we can I suppose.

And on that note: let's get this adventure started!

Christmas in Canada: Winnipeg

Oh gosh, I've put this off for way too long... I was originally going to publish this back in January, and then in March, and then I thought it would work well to publish it for Christmas in July, and then... you get the picture. But hey, I've finally buckled down and finished it off. That's right, the story of what I did at Christmas is coming some 10 months later. Enjoy!

Actually, once again for Christmas I didn't travel to any exotic locations. In fact, it's probably going to continue that way for the foreseeable future, because I don't have any trips planned at all right now, including this upcoming Christmas. I haven't had any trips since then, either. It's kind of sad, but maybe in a year or two I'll get to go somewhere. Goodness knows I love to travel!

So, instead of traveling far away, I went back home to Canada to get my yearly snow and cold fix, and while I was there I spent a couple of days in Winnipeg. I've always loved going to Winnipeg. It's probably the place I've visited the most, so the city has quite a bit of nostalgia value for me. Yes, there are plenty of reasons to complain about it (like the roads; no planning whatsoever!), but I still look at it through rose-coloured glasses. For the past several years a new museum had been under construction in Winnipeg: the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Last September (the one in 2014) the museum finally opened, and I decided that while I was in town, I was going to check it out.

Christmas in Canada

Merry Christmas everyone!

I mean, for a few more minutes. It's pretty much over at this point, but whatever. Happy New Year! Yeah, that works.

Anyhow, this is just an update about what I'm doing this Christmas. The past two years I've gotten to go on fantastic trips around the world to visit friends and family (and family of friends), but this year, I wanted to do Christmas at home, with my family. So, I'm back in Canada. Well, I've been in Canada for a couple of weeks and I'm actually about to leave again, but the point remains that I wanted to have Christmas at home with my family, which I have now successfully done.

Yes, rather than trot around the globe this year, I figured that I'd save some money and visit my family in Canada, and then my family in Indiana (which is next on the agenda). I haven't seen the Indiana folks in quite a while, so it seemed like now would be the perfect time for a visit.

I hope that next year I might be able to go on a short little trip to somewhere exciting and foreign, but for this year, it was nice to come back to the -30 degree Celsius temperatures and snow of my hometown, as well as to hang out with my entire family, some of whom I hadn't seen in a couple of years. Siblings need to visit more than that.

So, this Christmas has been good so far and I look forward to the rest of my break. Maybe I'll actually get around to posting another story in the new year before the break ends... but don't get your hopes up.

Merry Christmas!

Travel Map

Alright, this is just a short little post to let people know about the new page that I've put up. On the right hand side of the screen, there's a new link under the Pages section called "Map of Places Visited." If you click on the link, it'll take you to a static page with... well, a map of the places that I've visited over the years.

This is actually an idea that I've had kicking around for quite a while now. I've wanted to have an interactive map with all of the locations around the world that I've been to marked on it, but making a map yourself is simply impractical. So, I've picked up a Google Maps API key, and I'm using their maps to mark my travels. The map is zoom-able, drag-able, and click-able. Currently it's all done with in-line JavaScript, which I would prefer not to have to use, but using Blogger and its templates makes things a little complicated, so I'm just dealing with it for now.

Right now, all I have marked are the different airports that I've been to. I think it's all of them. I marked an airport whether or not I exited it, so I haven't necessarily been to all of the countries that have a marker in them (although right now, Germany is the only country that I haven't been outside of the airport).

So, expect the page to change greatly over the next few months as I get around to updating it with more information and figure out better ways of inputting and displaying the data. I've got some other ideas for map types, so we'll see if I ever get to them.

On a related note, there's also a new link on the side to my Anime-Planet profile, in case you want to check out what anime series I have watched and what my general opinions of them were. I try to keep it up to date within a few hours of watching a show, so it should have recent data on it all the time. If you want to know exactly how much of my life I've wasted on this pastime, now you can know. Apparently I just passed the 150 series milestone today, so I guess that's an achievement.

I've got a whole list of article ideas kicking around now, so I'll try to put out a couple more before school starts up again and I get too busy to update this as frequently. Check back soon-ish for more.

p.s. 41 posts!

airbnb

Alright, I said that I was going to write up my experience with random internet houses in an article of its own, so here I am. I think this is the first time that I've actually followed up on something that I said that I'd write later. Huh.

Anyhow, for those of you who don't know, I recently had to find a place to stay overnight in Austin, and hotels are expensive. I was reading Gizmodo one day, and this article came up on my feed. It talks about how much cheaper it is to use the startup airbnb than it is to stay in a hotel. I decided to check it out, and managed to find a listing for $40/night. Compare that to the $80+ for a hotel (that doesn't even have a shuttle to the airport). Naturally, I was intrigued, but didn't bite immediately. I don't trust the internet very much at all, and this whole "stay in a stranger's spare room" thing seemed kind of sketchy to me.

ICPC St. Petersburg 2013: Day Four

This is Day 4 in a series. You might want to check out the previous day, or start at the beginning.

You may be wondering "why are you writing a blog post at 1:30am? Isn't that really early? Go to sleep!" Well, you see, I have to wake up at 2:00am for the bus to the airport to catch my flight, so... why go to sleep at all? Plus, I want to get this blog done before I go.

So, breakfast as usual, then off to the actual competition. I'm not sure why we had to have breakfast at 6:30 when we stood around in the lobby of the arena for an hour waiting for them to let us in, and then had to kill half an hour waiting for them to let us onto the competition floor, but such is life I suppose. We finally got to go to our workstations, and then had to wait another 20 minutes while they explained the rules and settings that they explained to us yesterday in the exact same way. But I guess reinforcement is good, especially if English is not your native tongue.

ICPC St. Petersburg 2013: Day Three

This is Day 3 in a series. You might want to check out the previous day, or start at the beginning.

6:30am breakfast is not what I wanted to hear, but it happened. Breakfast was in the hotel again, and immediately afterwards, it was off to the buses to go to the arena for the Dress Rehearsal. I say arena because it is being held in a hockey arena on the main floor. There are sheets dropped from the ceiling, and tables set up everywhere. 120 teams takes up a lot of space.

The reason that we have a dress rehearsal is not for the contestants primarily. Mostly, it is so we can test the system that they have set up for the contest, to make sure that everything is working, and that everyone knows how to use it properly: how to submit problems, how to find documentation, how to print, etc. When we got there, we were in the waiting area off to the side. For some reason (I think they were just stalling for time), they allowed teams to come up and get their picture taken with the cup. I'm not sure why you would if you didn't win it, but hey. There were a lot of people who wanted to, so I guess it makes sense.

ICPC St. Petersburg 2013: Day Two

This is Day 2 in a series. You might want to check out the previous day to start at the beginning.

The day started off in a fairly ordinary way (although I had to wake up earlier than I would have liked to for 7:30 breakfast). The hotel has a restaurant on the first floor, and we were given hot breakfast with all sorts of foods. There were pancakes, cheese pancakes (I didn't really like them very much), bacon, sausage, various pastries, cottage cheese, yogurt (with flavours such as prune), watermelon (which is yellow, not red), and a whole bunch of other stuff. It looks similar to an American selection, but there was just some stuff that was slightly different that would make you realize that you weren't in Kansas anymore. Not that I was in Kansas (my other teammates were though), but that's not the point.

When we finished with breakfast, it was time to head over to the Manége for the IBM TechTrek (a series of talks). The Manége is the building that used to be the stables for the King-Czar-Emperor-Ruler guy, but it has since been converted into an event center. The TechTrek presentations were given by two big names from IBM: Bjarne Stroustrup (who you may know as the inventor of the C++ programming language), and Jeff Jones, the man who wrote security programs for banks, voter registration, and casinos (who you may know as the man who wrote the software that caught the MIT card counters in the true story that the movie 21 was based off of). Suffice it to say, it was a fascinating morning.

ICPC St. Petersburg 2013: Day One

So, I'm in Russia right now. Crazy to think about, but true. Cyrillic characters are everywhere, and everyone you pass on the streets is speaking Russian. Crazy.

The reason that I'm here is to compete in the 2013 International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC). It's part of ACM (the international computer society) and is sponsored by IBM, who are paying all of the expenses for us over here. They've put us up in hotels, and they pay for all of our meals every day, and they're even paying for visiting some attractions, like the Hermitage and Saint Peter and Saint Paul's Fortress. The prize for this competition (aside from money) is a guaranteed job offer from IBM, for the top four teams. Pretty cool stuff.

The reason that I'm here is because back in September, the team that I'm on won our regional competition, which gives you a spot in the World Finals. Our region is small, with only about 60 teams in it. But there are just shy of 10,000 teams worldwide, of which only 120 get to come to the World Finals. Needless to say, I feel pretty privileged right now.

Christmas in Kenya: Days 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25

This is Part 5 in a series. You might want to checkout the previous post, or start at the beginning.

The Gate of Hell and School

We decided to go to Hell's Gate with Roswell's family. We would leave before them to eat lunch there, and they would meet us later at the picnic area. To get there from RVA, we had to descend into the valley. There are technically 5 ways down, but two are really far away and one is prone to carjackings, which only leaves two. The way that we chose to go down is the better road of the two when it's dry, but it had been raining the night before, so large sections of the road were now simply mud. Really thick, slippery mud, at that. There were times where we were going downhill with our nose pointed 30 degrees from the direction we were moving (I'd use radians but most other people don't like them). Surprisingly, it felt quite a bit like driving on a really icy road. Dagger's dad did a great job keeping us on the road, and there was never a time where I felt unsafe. Actually, most of the time it was just fun.

Christmas in Kenya: Days 15, 16, 17, and 18

This is Part 4 in a series. You might want to checkout the previous post, or start at the beginning.

Masai Market

Masai Market is a sight to behold. I mean, it is an experience, that's for sure. We woke up fairly early that morning to drive into Nairobi to get to the market. It's kind of on the outskirts of town, near the embassy district. The shopping center itself is actually very well off, with all sorts of shops and stores for the more wealthy citizens. It looks very much like a traditional Western mall. However, under a tarp roof, just outside one of the exits from the mall, there is a place set up for vendors. I think that it's close to the size of a hockey rink. There are hundreds of vendors set up in rows very close to each other all throughout this space, trying to sell their carvings, or their beads, or their shirts, or whatever else you are looking for. There are multiple vendors with the exact same items, so you can look at multiple options. Apparently it was not a crowded day, but it seemed packet to me.

Christmas in Kenya: Days 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14

This is Part 3 in a series. You might want to checkout the previous post, or start at the beginning.

Lazy Holidays

Day 10 was a Sunday, so naturally we went to church. However, the church that we went to was one that was down in the valley, in the IDP camp. This Internally Displaced People camp was formed four years ago, in the wake of the most recent elections. There had been much violence that had broken out because of the election, so many people had lost their homes. They were then placed in these IDP camps, originally in emergency tents. However, a couple of years back, Habitat for Humanity had come into this particular camp and had built the residents actual brick and mortar houses to permanently live in.

However, the community is still very poor. Everyone is wearing cast away clothing, there are people without shoes... that sort of thing. Because of their great need, one of the Kenyan men from the community around RVA, John, has taken it upon himself to help these people. Apparently, he usually boils ~150 hardboiled eggs and takes them to the children in the camp. This week, seeing as it was Christmas Sunday, he brought a huge bag of plumbs and a massive box filled with individual treat bags for the children. I don't know how he managed to get all those bags, but it was impressive. When we went down to the camp, we gave John a ride too. It was a bit of a cramped ride with the six of us plus John and his treats all in the Pajero, but we fit.

Christmas in Kenya: Days 6, 7, 8 and 9

This is Part 2 in a series. You might want to checkout the previous post to start at the beginning.

Wildlife In the Aberdares and Nakuru

This was the start of the "wildlife" portion of the trip. On Wednesday, we woke up, packed up, and then drove off to the Aberdares. The Aberdare park is a wildlife preserve that has houses that you can rent to stay in for the night. It's a very nice park, and there is a lot of wildlife around to look at. The scenery is beautiful too.

So, the first day we drove up to the park, which was an adventure in itself. The roads are pretty amazing in Kenya. I have never seen so many potholes in my life. You weave from one side of the road to the other in an effort to keep away from the nastiest of the potholes. It's pretty exciting, but I can see why people would want to have a four wheel drive car. Some of those holes were deep, and we bottomed out many times. The final count was 9 times, I do believe.

Christmas in Kenya: Days 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5

Adventures in Airports and Acclimation

Day 1 of my journey didn't start until about 8pm on Friday when the first flight left, so there wasn't much going on before that. I mean, we chilled at Dagger's cousin's house, but that was it. Chisel and I were pretty much the only ones home most of the day because Dagger and the rest of the family was at his cousin's graduation. When everybody else got back, it was almost time to leave (so as to avoid the traffic). We got to the airport without any major events happening, and made it through security, found our gate, and boarded the plane on time. We even took off on time. It's weird. International travel doesn't usually work out that well.