Ethiopia, Pt. 1

Left for Chicago on Friday evening (6/22). Spent the night with Sara & Dave.  

Here we are at O'Hare on Saturday morning (6/23).

Waiting for our flight.

Found out it was delayed an hour.

Having fun taking Instagram pics.

Then we found out our flight was delayed again.

And we got to JFK as our flight to Amsterdam was leaving.

And then they told us we were going to Cairo, then to Addis Ababa.

The clouds were really pretty.

Then we landed in Cairo, a.k.a. the desert.

And we were really pumped to go see the pyramids because we had an 11 HOUR LAYOVER.

But then we encountered some obstacles.

First, the airline graciously paid for a hotel room so we could freshen up during those 11 hours.

However, the airport took our passports from us. And kept them.

(We were a little panicky. I was convinced we were probably going to be trafficked.)

So we were shuttled to this hotel about 20 minutes from the airport, sans passports.

Second, turns out that Egypt was announcing the results of its first democratic election ever.

And there were over 100,000 people gathered in Tahrir Square... incidentally, 2 miles from our hotel.

Thankfully, the masses were appeased by the election of Mohammed Morsi. 

Third, I was pretty drugged up on dramamine and slept almost the entire time we were at the hotel.

So long story short... we didn't go see any pyramids. Boo.

We arrived in Addis Ababa at 3:30AM Monday (6/25). 

Our bags, however, did not.

After waiting around trying to figure out where our bags were (JFK, cool EgyptAir...) 

and when we could pick them up (3:30am the next day, awesome)

we finally got to our guest house at 5:00am.

And proceeded to sleep until almost 4:00pm that afternoon.

.

Don't worry, the trip gets better...