La joie de voler

I usually have a French word for each blog.  However, today is different because if I am ever going to teach you French in six months we will need move faster than one word a blog.  So today's phrase is "La joie de voler."  It means the joy of flying.  Since we are flying to Niger it is important that we focus on the joy part.  Let me explain:

I think I mentioned that we got a really good deal on our tickets to Niger.  Now as we get closer to leaving I am realizing that we are going to have to “pay the piper” for our frugality.

We leave for Atlanta at 6:30am on Friday, September 16^th.  If I remember right, we will need to be at the airport well before 6:30 to check-in and go through security and if we are going to be there early we will need to get up even earlier than that.  This just means I will start out our venture tired and crabby.  But what’s new?

We get into Atlanta at 10:10am and wait for an 11:52 flight to New York that gets us in at 2:15.  I might note that it takes 3:38 minutes to fly from Mpls to New York if you fly direct and if we had done so we wouldn’t have had to leave until 10:37, and hour that is a much better fit to my personality.

We get to enjoy the sights and sounds of the John F. Kennedy airport for 4:30 hours from 2:15 to 6:45pm.  Then we board a Royal Air Morac flight for Casablanca, Morocco, Africa.  This is a 71/2-hour flight that gets us in at 6:30am on Saturday, September 17th.  I’m tired already.  The Casablanca airport looks really nice and I hope it is because we will get to see it for 14 hours and 10 minutes.  I don’t know if we have to stay in the airport that whole time but even if we don’t, I have read that Casablanca is a uniquely boring city.  I always thought it was full of intrigue and mystery, at least it was in the movie, but evidently Rick’s Bar is about all there is to see and that’s not supposed to be that great.

At 8:20pm, we board another Royal Air Morac flight for Niger.  Somewhere in the middle of the night we get to stop in Ouagadougou, Mali.  Since I cannot pronounce it, won’t be able to see it, or care about it I don’t think this stop is going to be too exciting.

We get into Niamey at 2:50am on Sunday, September 18^th, just 44 hours and 20 minutes from Minneapolis.  We are excited about going to Niamey, but we are not so excited about the process of getting there.

We are taking four big wheeling duffle bags.  They will be filled with everything we will have for the next six months plus a few things for some of the people in the SIL center.  What do you think the odds will be of our bags arriving at the same time and on the same plane on which we arrive?  The advice of the day is “be flexible.”

We received a 2½ page instruction sheet for getting through customs in Niamey.  I won’t bore you with the details but thought it was interesting in the way it ended given that we have had a 44 hour flight and it will be around 3am when we land.  Here it is:

     “*Try to stay calm throughout the process.  It is not designed to be smooth and can be quite hectic.  This, together with the heat, can be very exhausting especially if you already have jet-lag.  If you need to step back from everything and take a breath or rest, do it.”