Day 3

Pretty uneventful day. Our flight took off from Zurich without fanfare or delay. I hit the jackpot on seating and got a bulkhead placement with lots of room for my legs. Unfortunately, my seatmate, a man from Tanzania, believed that all the armrest were his sole domain. He spread out and made himself quite comfortable. Sitting in the bulkhead provided a couple of interesting opportunities not typically available while flying. First, I sat knee to knee with the flight attendant during our take off and landing. I enjoyed the opportunity to ask her questions about flying around the world as she does. This is when I discovered she is a distant cousin to Helga, the attendant on my flight from New York. She launched into a tirade about Tanzania in general and Dar Es Salam in particular (the home city of my seat mate). She concluded the political debate by smiling and saying she had to get to work. She jumped up leaving my new friend a little thunderstruck, and with a need to defend his homeland to me. The other unexpected opportunity was to meet most everyone on the plane (because the bathroom is at the bulkhead). While I saw the space in front of my seat as a place to stretch my legs, everyone else also laid claim to that space to queue up for the bathroom. I spent most of the flight with the derrières of people in intestinal distress just inches from my face.

We landed in Nairobi without incident and enjoyed a 5-hour layover there. While in Nairobi we discovered that Kim’s inability to read international signs extends to the signs on restroom doors. It is so confusing: skirt, no skirt, which one to use.

Kenya Airways delivered us safely to Bujumbura, Burundi. Almost done. We paid for our visas and waited for one-fingered captain hunt and peck to manually type our paperwork. By the time he finished it was 1:30 in the morning. We piled into a van and headed off for our nights accommodations.