As of right now, I will be arriving in Cairo in 10 days. It still seems slightly unreal to me. I can’t quite believe it’s actually happening. It probably won’t hit me until I’m actually at the airport on the 23rd.
Speaking of the flight, I’ve got major issues with Delta. AUC has an airport pickup service (for $12 they’ll pick you up at the airport no matter what time and drive you to your dorm/flat/whatever), and while signing up for it I was double checking the exact time that my flight landed on Delta’s website. That’s when I noticed that they drastically “changed the schedule” of our return flight. It now leaves over 12 hours later, which messes things up on a number of levels. First of all, now Debbie and I won’t have anywhere to stay during the day because the dorms close that day (before, our flight left at noon so we would packed and at the airport before checkout time- whatever that time may be). Now we won’t be leaving until around 1:30ish AM Cairo time. This means we won’t get in to JFK until about 7 AM on the 31st. Well, my connection flight from JFK to Detroit leaves at like 7 pm on the 30th, so now I’m missing my flight home by a day. I was looking up what flights leave from JFK to Detroit on the 31st, so that when I call Delta to fix things they don’t lie to me. It looks like there aren’t any flight to Detroit until the afternoon/evening, which means that I will be spending about at least 24 hours sitting- 12 hour plane ride plus 12 hours in the airport (waiting for our flight to Cairo and waiting for my flight to detroit). Needless to say, I am not happy about this. Especially because Delta failed to inform me of this ‘schedule change’ and the fact that I’ll be missing my connection.
Other than that, preparations are going okay. I got my Egyptian visa in the mail yesterday. I realized that my licensed will expire when I’m overseas, so I went to try to renew it early at the secretary of state. That way, when I’m coming back into the US and going through customs, I won’t have to worry about having an expired license. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of this until about two weeks ago, and I waited until last week to go to secretary of state. The guy was extremely mean to me (fairly typical of secretary of state employees) and basically thought that I was attempting to get my license renewed early so that it would look like I was 21 and I could possibly get into bars easier (in Michigan they flip your license from vertical to horizontal when you turn 21). He said it takes “about two weeks” to get my new license, so I’m hoping to get it before I leave. I probably won’t, or I’ll get it like the day after I leave. I don’t want my mom to send it in the mail to Egypt, because apparently their mail system is not very reliable.
I’m going to spend the next few days packing and getting the last few things in order before I leave. I thought that having a month and a half break between the end of Fall semester and my flight to Egypt would give me far more than enough time to get everything done, but I every day I think of something new I have to do or buy or think about. It really does take a lot of planning!
