Well, more like Munich here we come!! ... wait 8 hours... Johannesburg, here we come!! ... wait 4 hours... Pietermaritzburg, here we come!!!
My favourite way to spend a Friday night, you ask?? Sleeping stretched out across 4 middle-aisle plane seats and being the first to eat dinner (thank youuu, special vegetarian meal plan)
This whole adventure started out on a pretty sweet note for me - our flights were pushed back so I was able to hang around Van for long enough to celebrate my birthday at home!! It's always a special time for me because I am lucky enough to not only have the same birthday as my Grandpa... but to also share my big day with my best friend Makaela too! So, after ringing in 24 with my best pals on a sun-soaked patio, I finished all my last-minute organizing, packing, and panicking in time for my May 9th flight to Munich!
Being in airports and flying have always been some of my favourite things (which certainly helps when you like to travel as much as I do!) so I can't say that I hated my journey to the other side of the world. That being said, claiming that I enjoyed it would also be a bit of a stretch... spending 10 hours cramped in a middle seat (a special kind of hell) only to have to kill 8 hours before boarding an even longer 11 hour flight was a bit of a doozy, even for me.
Making the best of a not-ideal situation, we decided - a decision that is very indicative of how little sleep we were operating on at this point - to venture in to Munich city centre during our first layover. So there we were, two sweaty/sleepy/disoriented girls with 8 hours to kill and absolutely zero plan, wandering downtown Munich; not the most productive touristy day, but I feel like we deserve some points for making the effort in the first place.
Back to the airport and ready to rock our second international flight in as many days!!11!!1!! (In case Ariana is reading this, and comes after me for how big a baby I am, I will mention that on our 11 hour flight down to Johannesburg, I did manage to snag myself an empty middle-aisle row, which meant that I could comfortably* lie down across 4 seats and sleep.) And, while I'm focusing on the positives, I will say that Lufthansa certainly knows how to treat their vegetarian friends (hellooooo caprese pasta and apple crumble)!
Touchdown, South Africa
One last sweet flight down from Johannesburg to Pietermaritzburg and we were done. Two days, three flights, and farrr too many plane meals later, we had finally reached our new home. With one of the warmest (if smelliest... sorry Carolyn!) welcomes ever, the joy of the whole thing did manage to filter in through all the fog of travel - and that joy hasn't really gone away. It's now been over a month, and the ups/downs/everything-in-between of living in South Africa still make my days feel just as exciting - if sometimes just as long - as those first travel days.
Thank you to anyone who has made it to the end of all this! While I would like to say that I will be continuing these quick little update/rambles, for those of you who know me and have had the pleasure (read: duty) to follow my past travel updates, you will know that consistency and brevity are two words that do not exist in my vocabulary. So... talk again in 2 months?? Sounds good to me.
*comfort in this context is veryyyyyy relative
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