Well the travel in itself wasn’t strange, but let me get to that.
We awoke early enough to be ready to leave at 7.30am, but this is Africa and so our bus was an hour late (preferable to the seven-ish hours we were left waiting in Mozambique). Our border crossing two hours later was straight forward and uneventful (plus we reunited with the other three teams which was great) as was the two hours to Johannesburg airport. That said, we then had about five hours to spare in the airport, which I spent posting home an item and then Skyping each member of my immediate family (which I hadn’t been able to do for over a month).
Next, our flight left at 8.30pm and lasted around nine hours – an overnight flight would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that I can’t sleep sat up, so two movies and two hours of failed attempts at sleeping later I commandeered the use of my friend Marian’s lap, so that I could lie down (curled up small) and try and sleep that way. Two hours of sleep/dozing later we arrived in Istanbul, Turkey, where we had time to travel across the airport and chill in the next gate waiting area.
Two hours of flight, including getting to know our stewardess Carolina, later we arrived into Bucharest, Romania. A bus ride took us to the train station, but that was not all (28 hours of travel at this stage). My team and the team we are paired with then had to wait 12 hours for our train… which became 14 hours due to the lateness of the train due to the weather. So at 2am (having had little that resembles sleep in the previous 42 hours) we got on our 10 hour train ride. I was finally able to lie down, albeit across my seat, a seat on the other side and a day pack on top of a backpack on the ground in between, and get some zzz’s. We arrived in Arad, waited an hour for our ride, drove half an hour and walked another 15 minutes to finally get to our ministry. Roughly 53 hours of travel – told you I reckoned it would be across three days.
And now, this is why it seems strange to us. I mean written down it makes perfect sense, but to experience it is something else:
- We left Africa, where we had experienced temperatures exceeding 100â�°F (sorry, I’ve gotten used to Fahrenheit terminology due to my company, about 35â�°C),
- And arrived in Eastern Europe, where the temperature at our ministry is 10â�°F (that’s -10â�°C, yes minus ten Celsius).
We’ve skipped a season, we’ve had no chance to slowly adapt to weather changes, we’ve gone from the height of summer to the depths of winter with no in-between. So we’re all a little thrown, and so are enjoying snuggling together under blankets. The place is nice though.
But that’s enough talking about it all, Dusty has wonderfully made a video documenting our travel (and I feature near the end, yay!) – hope that makes it clearer:
