"Akadugudu" means "Village"

I've arrived in Rwanda! At long last! At about 2:00 AM our plane landed at the Kigali International Airport. We had a four hour layover at the Istanbul International Airport at one point. 

The flight had it's good and its bad points. One example of an awesome thing was the movies offered by Turkish Airlines. I could've watched Space Jam. SPACE JAM. Remember? That movie that Michael Jordan did forever ago with like Bugs Bunny. It had 50 pages of movies, with 6 movies on each page. That's 300 movies. I highly recommend it! Also you can call other passengers from your seat for free!

A bad point was the fact that by the time the food service got to the 17th row (my row), they ran out of chicken. So you either had fish or nothing. Then later when I went to pee I saw a flight attendant eating two things of chicken. Maybe its just the malaria pills making me moody, but that ticked me off.

Anyway, we stayed overnight at a cute little hotel. I roomed with Katie M. It wasn't just a room though, it was like a whole villa. Complete with a mini-kitchen and living room area. It also had two bathrooms. One upstairs, one downstairs. Its a bummer I passed out as soon as I got to the room, I hope to fully enjoy that little hotel in the future. 

Okay, the rest of the day. We exchanged money. After that, we could officially "make it rain." The exchange rate between American USD to Rwandan Franc is crazy. One US dollar is 632.327 Rwandan Francs. And we were also only given 2000 bills, needless to say, it was a pretty thick roll of money handed to us. 

Then we went to like a little shopping mall and got sim cards and phones. THEN we went last minute grocery shopping. Its even more impossible to get any other food at ASYV then it is at Yemin Orde. So I stocked up, and we headed to the village. 

IT IS BEAUTIFUL. The internet here is really slow, but I'm really hoping to get my pictures up on my blog and on my Facebook tonight. But who knows? 

I am rooming with the following lovely ladies: Katie M, Jenn G, Marnina C, and Ali G.We superficially unpacked for a half hour before going to this energy presentation happening in the village. Yosef Abramowitz, who's this really big solar energy guy in Israel, is setting up solar panels behind the school of the village which could potentially provide up to 10% of the country's energy. So that was pretty cool. For my fellow YCers--they had a presentation thing on him at the Masa concert, the one who's Sarah Silverman's brother in law. He has a wikipedia page. 

After that I committed myself to blogging and uploading. MAYBE if I'm lucky I can stay on top of this.   Perhaps even blog more than anticipated. Ya'll will just have to wait for the adventures to come! 

SO, I just had dinner, rice and beans as expected. I had to give a mini introduction for the whole group to about 600 kids. So props to New Trier Theatre 1,2,3,4 for constantly reminding me to project and 

enunciate.

The most interesting part of the longest 24 hours of my life happened only a few minutes ago, as we were returning home from dinner we had our first guest in our room: Francisco the lizard. For about 10 minutes, Francisco was viciously chased about our apartment, in multiple attempts to either kill him or evict him permanently. One attempt was in fact successful, with the use of broom sticks and a garbage can. Luckily, Francisco will live to scare Ali another day. And in the meantime we have fashioned a lizard door block out of duck-tape and a paper bag. 

Its going to be an interesting ride my friends. Get psyched.

Also, great news! I have uploaded the majority of my photos here! Be sure to check out the one of the lizard chase :)

As always, 

Julia Rose