back in NYC

I am back in the real world. And the last two days were the longest in history.

On Tuesday morning I woke up around 7, in my bed with my mosquito net and no covers in the Karibu hotel in the heart of Stonetown, Zanzibar…wow it already feels worlds ago and away. We took a taxi to the airport for our noon flight to Dar Es Selaam, which is the capital of Tanzania. We had a close call with our bags: when we last minute decided to go check on them to make sure they were still on the plane, only to see them going around and around on the baggage carousel. Basically if we hadn’t checked, our bags would still be Tanzania. Got back on a plane to Arusha. We got into Arusha around 2pm and our next flight wasn’t until 9 that night. So we just camped outside under a tree and read books and ate our mangos. Around 7 we went inside and then we met Greg. Greg started talking to us by commenting on the tons of crushed peanut shells that were strewn all over the floor near us. They weren’t ours. He was basically just really friendly and such a character. He seemed slightly paranoid about the flight, ie he got up every 10 minutes to go check the planes progress and how much longer till we got to board, etc. But he was really funny and we made a bet with him about our flight. Loser takes winner out to dinner. We are taking him to John Jay dining hall at Columbia.

We took a 777 airplane from Arusha to Amsterdam, but since the Arusha airport is so small there aren’t any tunnel terminals. By that I mean that you walk on the pavement outside up to the steps and then get on the plane that way. We had done this plenty on all the smaller flights, but this time it was a 777. It was completely the biggest human creation I have ever seen. I have no idea how it actually gets off the ground. It was incredible. We actually had to fly right back to Dar and then we went to Amsterdam. Our flight left Arusha at 9pm and got into Amsterdam at 7 the next morning (with 1 hour time zone difference). We immediately left the airport (after some serious difficulty with reading the signs in Dutch) and took a swanky train into the city.

I walked out of the train station and felt something that seems nearly impossible to describe. I’ll try tho. The world is huge. The western world is even bigger somehow. To go from Stonetown and Nanyuki to Amsterdam is such a huge, cataclysmic change: everyone is white, everyone is walking fast, everyone is dressed soooo trendy (it made me sick). Everyone is white here. Duh soph, I know but it’s true. I am just another person, another white girl among hundreds and thousands. No one stops to talk to me on the street, no one calls out to me; the girl sitting next to me at Nussbaum this morning didn’t even look at me, let alone want to start a conversation. No one wants to talk to each other here. Amsterdam was this huge shock I was just walking around in a complete daze I could barely see straight. It doesn’t even make sense to me now because I’m separated from the feeling, but at the time it was the strangest sensation of my life. Life is just totally different in a western country. Everything is clean, everything has soap, and a toilet seat. Everything has toilet paper and a toilet! We were lucky to get a long drop in most of the towns we visited. There’s running water. There’s about 10 different muffin choices at each bakery. There are 5 salads on menus. Food doesn’t give me the shits. What am I saying, I know all this was here, I knew it was different when I was away from it. But it’s completely incredible how easy it was to forget it all existed and to just get used to not having a toilet, or running water that I could drink, or trendy clothes and fast walking people. Going to Africa was easy somehow. I think it was because I was going from big to small. Somehow going the other way is just really trippy. I thought about this for a while and realized that what is the strangest part of the whole thing, or maybe the best way to describe it is this: the strangest thing in life is when the familiar suddenly seems foreign and the foreign seems familiar. I expected Africa to be different and it was. What I didn’t expect was for NYC to feel like a foreign country does.

Back to the story. We left the train station in a daze and went pastry shopping. They have the most amazing pastries there all over the city. We basically had the plan to walk all day and see as much of the city as we possibly could. We had 12 hours between our two flights. Everyone in Amsterdam rides bikes everywhere. Seriously, there are possibly more bikes than there are cars. Instead of car garages, there are bike garages; there are lanes on the roads just for bike. Anyway, we decided to rent bikes for a few hours. Best decision ever. Just biking around this city neither of us had any idea about was so much fun. It was so weird to be in Europe with all the expensive fruit, expensive clothes, expensive trains that don’t bump you once…

We biked for about 3 hours all over the city, through a little park and along all the beautiful canals. Amsterdam is laid out in a really neat way. I don’t really understand it, but there were all these rings of streets all circling around the center of the city. And there were canals and little bridges to cross the canals at each ring. It was so beautiful. We stopped to buy some peaches, which I had completely forget even existed. I knocked into an entire display of blueberries in the process. I think buying the fruit was the first time I realized just how different it all was. In Africa people are so on top of you to buy what they are selling that you actually cannot walk down the street without being pretty much attacked by people selling you things, like I’ve said so many times. But here there’s nothing like that. I was buying a book today on the street here in the city, and I caught myself walking by the tables of books and, though I wanted to look at what they were selling I had this feeling inside that I wasn’t allowed to stop and look because if I did, then they would pounce on me and I’d end up buying something I didn’t want or need. That is what would have happened in Kenya. Then I realized that it wasn’t like that here. First of all, the guy selling books wasn’t saying anything to me, and second of all it wouldn’t have been an issue if I hadn’t bought something. So I stopped and looked and asked how much a book was. He told me it was $4 and I was about to bargain with him and pay $3, when he told me he would give it to me for $3 before I even got the chance to banter with him. That was really funny and made me smile. I told him the whole story actually. So when I picked another book out and asked how much he said $4 and then he let me bargain with him just for fun.

New York is huge. And it doesn’t end. And I know that. And I knew it. Maybe I just forgot just how big it all really is…

I think this is the final, final entry. I am so glad I wrote all this. I was reading it over the other day and it was such a great way to relive the whole experience. I’ve been back in the states for less than a day and the entire trip already seems ages ago and it seems like so far away from me. Last night was the first night I spent away from Lauren in 6 weeks. I miss her. Not entirely sure what I’m supposed to do without her by my side experiencing everything along with me.

Hope to see anyone who has read this at my house on Saturday. We’re having a party. And Lubin party’s rock.

Love to everyone,
sophiebess