11,504 miles

11, 504 miles and three days later, we're finally in Kigali (as of Friday)!! Traveling from Tuesday to Friday was definitely tiring, but we had a great time seeing some other parts of the world during our long layovers! Seriously though, try sleeping two nights in a row in plane seats. It doesn't happen. We did try... look how ready we were!

Getting comfy with neck pillows and glasses! To bad it's still impossible to sleep on planes...

Our first stop outside of the U.S. was Paris, but just for Abby and I. Maggie got to spend some time in Munich on her way over. We spent 9 or 10 hours walking and riding trains around, trying to see as much as we could! I think we did pretty well considering how the 7-hour time difference completely erased Tuesday night for us and we hadn't slept.

Abby and I in front of Fontaine Saint-Michel! The other American tourists who took this picture for us must not have understood that we wanted the fountain in the background, but here is the bottom half at least!

Notre-Dame Cathedral! We went in for a quick walk around the main floor. It was beautiful, and it would have been worth spending more time in if we didn't have all of our carry-ons with us and if we had more energy!

Delicious (and huge!) crepes with mozzarella. While we were walking from Notre-Dame toward Musée d'Orsay, we decided to try some less touristy roads that were further away from the river. We found some cool places like this crepe place, but the roads were far from parallel and we had to use our map quite a few times to get back on track.

Mustache sign? It took me days to find out that it actually means road-bump. This was in one of the alleys we were in as we tried to take a "path less traveled" between our tourist sites. 

Sooo tired after a long day on no sleep! Abby kept trying to give up on carrying her suitcase down the stairs, but it was so loud as it thunked down that she ended up picking it up every time! This is outside the Musée d'Orsay, which Abby said was really cool the last time she was here, but we didn't have the energy to go in so we just sat outside for a while.

Instagram-worthy? I don't know, but this tea was so good, and it was so nice to sit down for a while! Plus, their bathroom was down some stairs and now everyone knows about my weird obsession with basements :)

Tour Eiffel! We didn't go up to the top because of a "social dispute," according to the sign, whatever that means, but we took some pictures and went to relax in the grass off to the side! "Relaxing in the grass" really just meant sitting there like zombies staring off into space for a half an hour, then mustering up the energy to go find food and head back to the airport.

Paris was a really cool city to see and there seemed to be so much more worth visiting if we had had the time! Our overall impression was that the buildings are either ancient or space-age. There was a lot of really beautiful architecture and we realized how the fast pace of development at home and the emphasis on convenience and function resulted in a lot of comparatively boring buildings in the U.S. On the space-age side, we saw outdoor public bathrooms that were totally automatic and metallic, with a "wash cycle" in between uses that cleans the toilet and floor. I don't know how else to describe them, but they were really strange and futuristic. The airport was the other big space-age-looking thing that contrasted with the majority of the city. Walkways between terminals looked like giant air pipes, except with people flowing through them!

Being horizontal for the first time in a couple days - it felt amazing! We did some stretches on the gate floor, and then I fell asleep on it. Apparently people were laughing at me as they stepped around :)

Wednesday night was also spent in a plane, and although we expected to sleep the whole time, we still barely managed to. Thursday morning we arrived in Johannesburg, and after the long customs line, we finally met up with Maggie, who had arrived an hour earlier! We took some time to get to the hotel and shower, then we went to the Apartheid Museum. There was a special exhibit on Nelson Mandela, which was fascinating and inspiring to visit especially considering that we were in South Africa for one of his last days of life. The rest of the museum was extensive with a lot of reading, but the parts that I did look at were informative and heartbreaking at the same time. I personally don't understand the point of segregation based on the color of one's skin, and seeing some of the consequential inequalities reminded me of how big of a problem discrimination is and has been around the world and how it can easily spiral into something as horrible as the apartheid.

The GROW team on the roof of the Apartheid Museam in Johannesburg!  The city and part of the theme park can be seen in the background.

The Aviator Hotel, where we stayed overnight before our flight to Kigali. It was really nice, and the electric fences surrounding it were a stark reminder of the crime in the area, but also reassuring to us. We had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel, and it was very good! Everyone we met in Johannesburg was super friendly too!

 The flight from Johannesburg to Kigali was very quick, even with the stop in Bujumbura, Burundi. We got to Kigali way earlier than expected and spent a little time on the Wifi of a coffee shop until Cassien came to take us to our house! I will post more about our house in a bit, along with our crazy first day and the wedding we attended!