It is after dark and there are some lights shining out between the Cassia Lodge and Lake Victoria. It means that Shabbat has arrived. For that matter – it means that the first night of Passover has arrived as well.
We had finished by noon today, both with lectures and a session in Mengo Hospital Lab. I will not readily admit how many years it has been since I personally prepared thick&thin slides for malaria diagnosis. Since the flight times for our group varied from 1830 onwards we had a couple members leave from the lab directly to the airport. The remaining four of us came back to the hotel for the afternoon. Given that there were a number of hours, Silke, Sarah and I split a room so that we could rest, lounge and shower before getting stuck in the lobby for the last couple of hours.
Did I mention that I am returning home on Turkish Airlines via Istanbul?
No?
Well, anyway that is the plan. Lufthansa doesn’t fly directly from here. Nor does Austrian or Swiss Air. So my choice was Ethiopian or Turkish. Having flown on the latter, it was excellent plus I would rather change planes in Istanbul.
But I have not been able to check in on line. As it turns out, they have only the one flight per day coming through on a loop – Istanbul-Kigali-Entebbe-Istanbul which means that the counter might not be open for a while. I will update you….
(Right about midnight – give or take)
We left the hotel about 2030 and hit an insane amount of traffic immediately. So instead of taking 50-55 minutes it turned into almost 100 minutes. It was about when we were at the airport that the trip organizer mentioned about he was glad KLM didn’t leave till midnight. No, the time has been changed to 2330. Ooops. We get to the terminal to hit screening (everything through a huge x-ray that I am not sure had anyone watching the screen. The two on the KLM flight dashed for the counter which was about to close. Counter->Gate->boarding.
It was about then I found that Turkish Airlines doesn’t open their counters till around midnight…
But I managed to get checked in as soon as they opened, through immigration and to the “one lounge for everyone.” And everything to eat, other than fruit and chips is either on bread, wrapped in dough or is bakery products. Fruit is good, and chips are a vegetable, right?
