You have no idea

Happy Friday everyone! This must be a record blog post frequency for me! It's amazing how much more appealing writing blog posts becomes when the alternative is writing a forty page paper. But that is not to make you feel like sloppy-seconds my dear blog readers, you are always number one in my heart!

So, I don't like to play the Africa card. You know the whole "oh you think that ____ is bad, well in Africa ______." Because that is both disingenuous and super super annoying.

However.

There is one exception. One first world trifle that will now always make me chuckle. And that is when my friends in first world countries complain about the traffic. Oh, you think your traffic is bad?? You have NO IDEA.

My first day in Uganda, we arrived at the Kampala airport at 7am. After the roughly hour drive from Entebbe to Kampala, we had barely set our bags down when Terry, who had already been in town a couple of days, proposed he take us to this "great bar overlooking the city."

"Woooo welcome to study abroad!!!" I thought. So a gang of us set out to follow Terry to the bar. Little did we unsuspecting bazungu know, but he was taking us to Old Park. After winding my way through what can only be termed madness, knocking down a vendor's stand in the process and feeling mortified, we finally sat down at the bar. "What have I gotten myself into?!?!?!" I thought. "How am I ever going to learn to navigate this??"

Scenes from Old Park:

Right before our Ethiopian cooking lesson, Hannah and I stopped at the same bar. As we sat overlooking Old Park, the inevitable reflections began. We talked about how we felt we had come so far in Kampala. How the things that once felt unconquerable now felt commonplace, easy. I'm not sure exactly when that moment happens when you stop feeling like a tourist, and start feeling like a resident, but as I looked at Old Park with total comfort, I was certain that it had happened. While I once wondered how I would survive Kampala, I now wonder how I am ever going to be able to leave.

So, go ahead and complain about your traffic. With your "lanes" and "traffic lights" and "cars that go the right way in traffic" and "no livestock on public transportation." That's fine. But until you've conquered Old Park, you have no idea.