Al-Sudan !

WE
have at long last ARRIVED
in the SUDAN.

Such satisfaction has rarely been seen on the faces of two travellers. I hope Omar al-Bashir sincerely appreciates what lengths- and continents- we have gone to just to get here. Though somehow, disappointingly, I doubt his omnipotent Generalness is even interested.
Governmental indifference aside, we have accidentally checked ourselves into a nicer (and more expensive) hotel than David originally intended. I'm beginning to lose faith in his repeated yet thus-far empty promises of hole-in-wall hotel rooms. While this hotel technically does have a few holes in the wall, it's really otherwise just fine, if a bit in disrepair. My room has a functional bathroom, complete with toilet paper; the bed has sheets and a pillow; there is even a fridge with sodas in it. Really, the only thing lacking is the assurance that the hotel manager will not try to become better friends with me at midnight via certain persuasive tools and his own copy of my room key, but luckily, I am (a) forewarned (b) prudish and (c) resourceful. Every piece of furniture available in my room is thus currently stacked against my door, and fortified by the bed itself and my own added weight. I look forward to sleeping peacefully tonight.

Generally speaking, this hotel is really quite nice, if suffering a bit from inattention and the passage of time. The phrase 'faded glory' comes to mind. Apparently certain regime policies and current events haven't done wonders for the tourism industry in the lovely capital.
Which we've noticed in more than one way.. though I have seen two or three other uncovered female heads, we've yet to see any other foreigners, or any other white people. I'm conservatively dressed, but nonetheless I seem to stand out anyway. Memories of rural Japan are renewed, but I'd be lying if I said I was as comfortable: not possessing any familiarity with the culture or language, I'm not sure how to interact with anyone, and the continual overtures from Khartoum's considerably-less-shy population tend to throw me a bit.
But perhaps I'm devaluing my abilities. I suppose I did learn how to count in Qatar, so the next time a stranger comes up and yells "WELCOME TO SUDAN!" at me, I could express my appreciation by yelling back to him, "ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE!"
It might make for an interesting interaction, anyway.

Oh, Qatar.

So.. best laid plans of mice and men, et cetera.. and I'm in Qatar.
(I was not supposed to be in Qatar.)
I am supposed to be in Khartoum, rendering my current location (Doha) not only an unforeseen city but also an unforeseen country. And continent.
It happens, I suppose.
At any rate, this is Qatar.

The Qatari flag is everywhere, particularly hung vertically as a banner with the silvery and white bit at the top. I am suddenly conscious of my naked head, but not necessarily of my skin color, because Doha seems to be virtually owned by foreigners. Our taxi drivers are Indian; the restaurant waiters were South Pacific; the money exchanger was Pakistani. Truly a cosmopolitan blend, but one that does manage to come across as whole-heartedly 'mid-eastern'. Labrynthian souk markets offer dazzling arrays of scarves and tantalizing smells from the baskets of spices piled outside shops. Prayer mats are for sale alongside blades, keepsake-boxes, and amulets inscribed with arabic quotations from the Qur'an. Neither of us bought anything, but it was beautiful just to look at. A feast for the eyes.

Walking afterwards along al-Corniche, a paved tree-lined walkway along the water, we happened to witness an unusual spectacle. A series of large white SUVs flew wildly down the broad avenue towards us, honking fit to beat the band, followed by others, and still others. Many cars had all the windows rolled down and men bedecked in white robes sitting or hanging out of their vehicle, despite the frenetic pace and consequent weaving through traffic. One sunroof-equipped vehicle barrelling noisily down the center lane memorably had a man calmly standing out the top of the car, arms outstretched for all the world like a messenger of god.
My first wild guess would have been that this was some sort of elaborate celebrity cortege, but travelling with a professor has many benefits, and I learned that this was apparently a post-ceremonial wedding processional.
The haphazard stream of flying, honking cars continued past us for at least a minute, interspersed with other mundane traffic - occasionally caught up in the joy of the moment and honking good-naturedly as well.
Even in my jet-lag haze, I couldn't help but grin at such a celebration. How I would have loved to be in one of those cars, hanging out the sunroof with my friends and family, honking our heads off into the night and flying down the highway.

.... still here??

The Herculean battles fought- and lost- with U.S.Air over flight (and even hotel!) compensation do not need to be recorded here; nor do those fought trying to get on any plane to the Sudan the next day. Suffice to say, we finally succeeded with Qatar Airlines, to date the most luxurious airline I have ever or probably will ever fly on. (And, incidentally, about a sixth the price of any American airline corresponding flight.)
Our difficulties in getting out, however, meant that we spent Sunday morning NOT en route to Khartoum, but slouched in our respective beds at the Washington D.C. Hilton. I reflected on the amount of life-threatening dangers family and friends had predicted befalling me by this point in the trip, and decided I am thus validated in recounting here my greatest adventure thus far: the assemblage of our water filter.
Given the occasionally dubious quality of water in the third world, and the equally dubious coverage bestowed by my (lately adminstered) Hepatitis A shot, the portable hand-pumped water filter David was bringing along would probably see a good amount of action before long. While he waged telephonic battles with airlines, travel agencies, and credit card companies, I decided to make myself useful and put the filter together. The directions were clear, and before long I hoped to be transferring one mug of Hilton Hotel tap water into another like a pro.
The first cup was, in a word, frothy. Not a word I had hoped to apply to our drinking water. When the foam cleared, another adjective presented itself to my mind as an accurate descriptor of the : black.
As I stood there, looking down at the black, foamy cup o' fun in my hand, David chanced to look up from his latest phone call. "How's it going?" he inquired eagerly. "Can I have some?" Upon seeing the proffered cup, however, his eagerness definitely faded. "What is this, coffee?"
A second, more thorough viewing of the instructions confirmed that the first liter filtered should be discarded for containing "harmless" carbon dust residue. The pamphlet warned of a 'slight discoloration'.
..I took a picture, and will let y'all judge the 'discoloration' for yourselves.

Preparations complete, and we're off !... sort of.

So, the bags have been packed, the shots have been taken, the pills have been choked down with a splash of Baileys in a goodbye toast with me pop, and it's time to go!
The first part of the trip was simple: just get to Washington Dulles IAD Airport to meet up with David, some time before our 8:30p.m. departure for Italy, then Addis Adaba, then Khartoum. Simple, ne? O ye of blissful ignorance of my dear mater, nothing involving travel is simple. I'll spare you the infamous story of Jana and the Untimely Death of Independence Air, and summarize in saying that my mother places a very high regard on adequate layover time.
As in, ten-plus hours.
Since our flight was due to leave at 8:30p.m., it was probably a good idea to be there at least two hours before. Maybe add a little more in case my Pittsburgh-IAD flight was delayed an hour or so. You figure, arriving around four, that's plenty of time and more.
Again. Ye of blissful ignorance of my mother's travel-doom-prediction-talents. Normally I book my own travel and she's none the wiser, but as she had offered to pay for the one-hour flight as a Christmas present, she was more than usually involved in the booking. Wise from lost battles years before, I didn't put up a fight, and agreed to arrive at Dulles Airport at the ripe early hour (still probably a little risky) of SIX FORTY FIVE A.M.
As one shocked friend put it : "You could drive to D.C... and BACK.. TWICE." Yes. I could. But this is not taking into account the sudden snowstorms, highway closures, lost baggage, flight cancellations, and hijacking attempts that my mother has planned for. So, she was happy, and I was early, and looked forward to spending about fourteen hours at Dulles Airport on Saturday, December 27th.

As ironic fate would have it, however, my mother was to be the proven victor (my just desserts for my renderings of her online), and I was to spend far far more than fourteen hours at Dulles International Airport that day. David was due to fly in at 5:30 p.m. - I know what my mom must have been thinking - that's only THREE hours in advance! Nowhere NEAR enough time! .. and she was right. U.S.Air officially failed at spectacular levels unforeseen by even the most hardened of travellers, and managed to get him to the airport at just about 8:30. So we could watch our plane fly away together. How nice.
I'll spare the reader the ensuing lost battles with U.S.Air and a variety of other airlines (and then hotels), as David and I desperately tried to find a way out of the country that day or the next. (If only he'd had a fourteen-hour layover too..)In dejected failure we retreated to the airport Hilton for the night, a step up or two from the hole-literally-in-wall joint he had planned for the trip's first night, in the Sudan. He warned me from the depths of one of the two plush, softly blanketed and doubly-mattressed beds, voice muffled by soft white pillows: "Don't get used to it, princess."
(I'll try not to.)

Preparations, part two

Step Two: the packing

While the medical preparations were at least exhaustive in attempt, I've actually been much less careful in the packing itself. "Exhaustive" is not a quality I am seeking. I hate to schlepp crap. Every purse I've ever had is the size of one or two hands; my car is spartan-esquely empty; moving days are the worst ones of my life. I just hate schlepping crap.
Keeping this fundamental rule in mind, I kept in mind the following guidelines for a packing list:

(a) if i take it, i have to carry it
(b) if i take it, i'll probably lose it, break it, or ruin it beyond imagination
(c) if i take it, and don't ruin it, i'll probably be relieved of it by an dexterous stranger before long

which leaves me carrying: a small set of clothes, a smaller one of toiletries, a few precious (consumable) books, and four risky pieces of technology: a camera, its bits (battery/card/charger/cord), contact lenses, and my cd player. I'm hoping to hold onto most of them as long as possible, particularly those contact lenses - my extreme blindness transfers into low resaleability - but we'll see how it goes.

Speaking of clothes, I was informed that my current wardrobe may not have much to offer in the way of blending in with Nigerian/ Sudanese fashions. Given guidelines (b) and (c) above, I chose to create a new one entirely at GoodWill. 30 minutes spent holding up every floor-length garment in the skirt aisle produced the following satisfying aquisitions for exactly six dollars total (where's my runway?) :

the first, very classy, i thought

the last, also

the third is a real risker - notice the ankle exposure when i shrug - and the second is all but useless in the sudan - but the fabric was soft and i just couldn't resist.
(i've always been a sucker for tactiles.)

Preparations

Step One of Preparations: Stayin' Alive

So, apparently the Western World of Medicine holds certain ideas about Africa, one of which is that anyone who goes there without a pedigree of immunizations will surely die in a horrible and painfully spazzing way (and might anyway). I'm told this is accurate. At the risk of making an off-color joke that will get me into an *awful* lot of trouble later about certain popularly-held conceptions of Africa, I'll launch right into an inventory of the various things I've been subjected to lately in the goal of preserving my quite excellent (if hiccupping) health during my travels.
First there are the shots; the yellow fever goes without saying, nasty but neccessary; I've already got the HPV and Hepatitis B, and suffered through tetanus-pertussis, measles, mumps, and rubella. Discovered through failed titers that I additionally needed polio, so got that too. So far so good right?
Until the Hep-A - it's a six-month series, but I was only in the States for four (Sept-Dec). The card-carrying lab-coat-sporting doctor optimistically told me that if I went to get it *right* before I left, I'd earn myself a shadow of immunity that would last through the first six months of the trip. Then I'd just sort of .. float my way through those last two months. This sounded like a pretty good plan to me (as opposed to zero shot, zero immunity) so I went for it with my usual zeal, waiting riiiiiight up until Dec 20th to get that shot.
At which point I discovered that while what he said is related to the truth, it's not quite all the way there. That truth being that the first Hep-A shot gives you immunity for up to one year; you just can't get the second shot until six months later at the earliest. So I could have gotten the shot any time over the last three months, and would have been fine through to at least September of 2009. The beautiful irony of his advice is that the one time I actually couldn't get the shot and have immunity is, you guessed it, right before the trip - because the immunity takes several weeks to kick in. So, I'll be washing my vegetables carefully in the Sudan.
Then, there are the pills: after a particularly intense session at the Allegheny County Health Clinic in which my upper left arm was visited by pertussis, yellow fever, and MMR, I was enchanted to learn that typhoid is immunized orally. Fantastic! I thought to myself as I pocketed the $45 pills. I got busy, it rained, the dog ate my homework, etc., and not until I pulled them out of their safeguarded location in my med cabinet six weeks later did I notice the "PLEASE REFRIGERATE" label pasted on the front. Highlighted. In blue.
Feeling a bit sheepish, I drove my way back to the Health Clinic yet again - they knew me pretty well by this point - and explained what happened. For reasons I'm not examining too closely, they somehow accepted responsibility for my refrigeratory incompetence and gave me a brand-new set. Needless to say, I was more careful with this one, knowing it would surely be my last, and over the eight-day regimen I followed the temperature requirements to a tee. Even, when necessary, stuffing a single pill, ziplocked, into a bag of ice, ziplocked, in the back of my car so I could take it while out/about, at 50F, exactly the same time each time, and one hour before I ate.
Take THAT, typhoid!!

Boy, if I get typhoid in Ghana, I'm gonna be so pissed.

So then all that remained pill-wise was to protect myself from malaria. While vaccination isn't exactly an option, anti-malarial pills are, and a wide and exciting variety exist. Including, in fact, one with side effects rivaling heroin itself, the usual hum-drum suspects of headache, nausea, dizziness, fever and vivid dreaming paired with the excitement of confusion, nightmares, ear-ringing, unexplained anxiety, severe depression, paranoia, aggression, seizures, suicidal urges, hallucinations, and the general psychosis that only hard drug-users normally get to have. (the lucky sods.)
But don't you know it's my lucky day... because guess which anti-malarial drug is also the easiest to obtain and easiest to take along this type of trip?? At the recommendation of a former peace corps volunteer, I bought one (1) pill and decided to try it out on myself while in the (in theory) "controlled" environment of my parents' house to see how much joy I might really bring to this trip.
I was quite excited about this one-week trial (see picture) and made a point of telling two close people and no one else, hoping to hear both specifically-attentive and unbiased reviews of my personality on psychosis-inducing drugs. I secretly rather looked forward to a tense moment of melodrama at the end of five days in which I would potentially find myself perched on a ledge, holding a scimitar, screaming to astonished friends my terrible secret: I was tripping on mefloquinine.

Unfortunately... I am apparently one of the dull three people in four who isn't really affected by the drug. Nothing happened. My confessions of anti-malarial-pill-poppings to friends didn't really elicit more than an "oh, really?" The only change seemed to be that I am somehow LESS crazy while on it. After someone pointed this out, I noticed that the anti-malaria week did in fact seem mildly shrouded with a veneer of general euphoria.* Homicidal pitfall avoided; I eagerly picked up $246 worth of the stuff. (Get excited: shopping around saved $300.)

*Side note: said euphoria abruptly terminated in a pit of cranky hopelessness two days after the cycle ended. that, too, passed, but briefly made me wonder if I was going to have issues coming "off" the mefloquinine.. but only briefly, because apprehension about coming off was forgotten in excitement to go back on.

So, it would seem I am medically quite ready to go. In case of a happy-pill failure, I also have DEET and a mosquito net; to tide me until my hep-a immunization I have Purell and a water pump. Side comments about Imodium AD not welcome. And I'll try not to feel too silly about all of this if I'm ultimately taken down by a pride of lionnesses. After all, we're all mortal, aren't we ?

Leaves are falling all around..

! w e l c o m e b a c k ! bienvenue ! ようこそ ！ youkoso !
friends and lovers,
to the online frittering of empty time that my "blogs" have always aspired to be.
(i never can get used to that word, "blog". it sounds like something a toddler would be scolded for saying.)
attempts to read meaning into my title will be met with great amusement.

A touch of background, though probably unnecessary, just for fun: I am getting ready to embark on a bit of a trip to the middle swath of Africa in a few days here. I'm going along with a prof who is consistently referred to by most of his department as "Indiana Jones." It is my first time going to Africa unless you count a half-day stint in Tangiers during which my great-aunt and I discovered that we are both very naive. One never learns so much about oneself as when one attempts to succeed at another country.

So I imagine I'll probably be learning a lot about myself.

Anyway, so I'm not actually that well-versed in 'travel' per se; my prior experiences in other countries have been almost exclusively of the squatting nature. I go, I stay, I putter around and try to emulate those around me in a desperate bid to blend in. Mixed success. Some in Europe, none in Japan. But most other travelers (resisting the urge to add that second L) can talk me under the table on the topic of railpasses, Lonely Planet, backpack smell, and bars in Amsterdam.

I tell myself I'm ready for the hygenic part, at least, thanks to showering in a vat for most of the last year. And my very newly-acquired skill of eating whatever it is that happens to be on my plate, in motion or otherwise, is definitely going to become handy.

Things I'm wall-bouncing-ly excited about:

• the food
• learning any amount of Arabic
• not being cold
• getting to experience what dictatorships are actually like from a non-intellectual perspective
• the Red Sea
• hearing the complete version of any one of 45,203 party-stopping tales of past adventures that David, aka "Indiana Jones" keeps tantalizingly half-alluding to, but refuses to properly tell, given how much "bonding time" we'll be having later for storytelling.
  

Things I'm wretchedly anti-excited about

• having crackedly dry hands
• not getting to meet any dictators, or even high-ranking ministry of information types
• missing charles, the inspiration for all my ambitions and honored in the bottom right corner
• mosquitos
• the inevitable date at which point David will discover I am not, perhaps, all I seem cracked up to be in terms of competence, and am really quite a bit of a fool (see islandgaijin.blogspot for details.) In the meantime, if you know him, don't tell.

So, this is where i'll be dumping commentary as we go along. i have absolutely no idea how often internet will be a part of my life, and I'd be lying if i pretended to be a timely poster. the stories will be written. the blog will be created. but whether the stories will make it into the blog is, well, sort of a toss-up... i'll ganbaru!