En route to ETHIOPIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



It has been a long, but GREAT day. After a wonderful four days in Rome, we flew out around 5.50pm last night. We were in the air most of the night, and landed in Cairo, Egypt around 2.30am. Cairo airport was intense, to say the least. Two separate times our passports were taken from us with no comment other than, "You Sit".



So, to make the best of a bad situation, we (in true Smith fashion), struck up a conversation with the only two other people in our terminal: a young man from the UK (Aidan) and a nice guy from Russia (named Roman). We spent the next few hours chatting it up and exchanging money. Roman didn't speak much English, but gave us a rubel and showed us video of his family back in Russia. He was headed to Zambia to see his father in law. The wife and baby had stayed at home. (This much we determined by using mostly hand signals). I have him a bag of planters peanuts and he handed me a Russian chocolate bar. :) It was actually pretty awesome.



Aidan, the brit, was headed to Mumbassa to head up a backpacking program he does every year. He was a stand up guy and we shared a lot of laughs. The poor guy had missed his flight to Kenya by minutes, only because he had been held up by the Cairo airport officials for nearly 2 hours at the wrong terminal. When he finally got to OUR terminal (the correct one), he was told he couldn't board because he hadn't gotten there soon enough. All in all, he had a pretty great attitude. I have been known to cry in less stressful situations than that.



After a couple hours of talking and laughing, we were all given back our passports and told we could board our plane in an hour. All in all, Cairo (though intense), turned out to be one of our favorite memories of our trip. Our plane, unbeknownst to me (and my flight itinerary), was also making a stop in Khartoum, Sudan. Lucklily, we did not deboard and merely picked up more passengers. This, however, made us about an hour late for our MEETCHA DAY in Ethiopia. I spent an hour on the Khartoum tarmac chewing my nails, wondering if we were, in fact, going to miss our "meetcha day" entirely.



Finally, our plane took off, and we arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia around 9:00 am, Monday morning. We rushed around, retrieved our luggage, and met our America World coordinators in the airport lobby. From there we headed to the Yebsabi Guest house where we dropped off our luggage, changed clothes, and jumped back in the van to go and meet OUR SON!!!!!!!!!! Within about an hour of landing in Addis, we were meeting Phin for the very first time . . . . More of that in the next post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!