My Excellent Journey

My apologies for not posting anything in a month..."busy" begins to describe the hectic schedule that accompanies the end of a school term, but doesn't do it justice. Among other responsibilities, we have to administer end-of-term assessments, write out report cards for our students (in my case, that was for not only my 12 kids, but for all of the senior students as well because I teach them PE), practice for End-of-Term Celebration, and then execute said celebration.

So let me just address the first half of the month briefly and say that it was jam-packed with work and I'm pretty sure everyone at school is quite happy to be on break at the moment. Term One started on August 31 and ended December 17, and encompasses nearly half of the school year (there are 3 terms total). It includes two of the biggest annual school events, International Night and the Celebration. But it's done now, and after a fairly long journey to return to Texas for the holidays, I'm here in my room recuperating from the wisdom tooth extraction I underwent the morning after flying into Dallas/Fort Worth.

For this post, I want to talk about getting here from Iringa. First, I had to get from Iringa to Dar es Salaam. My list of flights started on Sunday, so on Saturday Hugh (the P5 teacher) very kindly drove me and Adam (who was also flying out on Sunday) all the way to Dar and to our hotel. It's an 8-hour drive, but we didn't hit too much traffic and it wasn't that bad.

On Sunday, I flew from Dar to Cairo, arriving in Cairo around 11 AM and reaching my hotel - the luxurious Hilton Golf Resort - at about 12:45 PM. Now, of course I can't afford to stay at a hotel like this on my own, but luckily for me my dad travels a lot and has amassed a hefty number of Hilton HHonors points...enough to get me a free room for one night at this hotel! And when I checked in, they must have seen my dad's point total and decided to treat me well - so they upgraded me from a double room to a SUITE, which was pretty great. It was so cool I had to take pictures.

It had its own balcony:

As soon as I unpacked, I hopped in a hotel car and went to explore the Pyramids of Giza, which were conveniently located just 20 minutes away from the hotel. Here you can see part of the Cairo skyline:

I was pretty excited about this, as you might imagine, and this wonder of the ancient world did not disappoint. Here's a picture of the complex (the Great Pyramid is the one on the right):

The Great Pyramid, with the Sphinx in the foreground:

From another angle (the Great Pyramid is on the left):

The structures are completely enormous. Here are the Pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure:

Once you stand next to the Great Pyramid, it boggles your mind. How humans managed to construct it thousands of years ago is practically beyond my powers of though. Each individual stone is enormous, as you can see from this picture:

The hotel driver was really nice and walked around with me and took some pictures. He thought this one was quite clever on his part:

After we took some pictures, the driver showed me where to go to take a camel or horse ride around the area. He recommended a horse, because camels are very slow, but the guide let me take a picture on the camel anyway before we went off on horseback. Here are pictures of me on both:

We trotted around the 3 large and 6 small pyramids, and you can see Saqqara in the distance behind the Great Pyramid. In this picture, all you see is sand:

Regrettably I didn't have enough time to go there and see the step pyramids. But we did go see the Sphinx!

It's impressive, obviously, but I have to say I thought it would be just a little bigger. Not sure why. I know it's very large, but the pyramids dwarf it. Again, though, it's still amazing.

The last place I went before leaving the area was inside the Great Pyramid. It cost extra, but I figured it would be worth it. I was wrong. All you do is walk inside, crawl up through a massively long tunnel:

and end up in a big dark room with nothing in it but an empty sarcophagus and an AC unit. It's cool to say I've been inside one of the Pyramids of Giza, but I expected a little more. Overall, though, it was incredible and I'm glad my flightplan worked out the way it did so that I had the chance to explore the Pyramids a bit. Here's one last picture from the ruins, of me on the steps of the Great Pyramid:

The next day, Monday, I flew from Cairo to Frankfurt and had a one-night layover in Frankfurt. Serious weather turnaround - I went from sunglasses and flipflops to my heaviest winter coat. And it was snowing! I stayed in a very nice hotel close to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station). Here's a few shots of my room, which was quite efficiently organized for its limited space:

And then, on Tuesday, I flew from Frankfurt to Chicago and then from Chicago to DFW. The weather was starting to turn in Chicago, but I convinced a counter attendant to give me a standby ticket on an earlier flight to DFW (the one I was booked on was delayed by 2 hours at that point) and I was lucky enough to get on it. So I made it to DFW late on Tuesday night.

Wednesday morning, I went to the dentist's office to get my 4 wisdom teeth removed. My face currently bears a marked resemblance to a chipmunk's, and I've definitely taken more painkillers in the last 3 days than I have in the last 3 years. But - get this - it snowed yesterday and today in Fort Worth! According to the newspaper, the last time it snowed and stuck on Christmas was in 1997, so this is pretty momentous.

I'll be sure to post again soon about my students, since I can finally put up some of the funny videos I've taken of them. In the meantime, happy holidays!