09/12/09

We left Namaacha today, where we have spent the past ten weeks living with our homestay families, attending language and technical classes, and otherwise passing the time and getting to know each other. Now we are split by region, so I am with the other people whose sites are in Maputo, Gaza, and Inhambane provinces (the southern region). Southern region piled on a bus that had exactly two seats fewer than the number of people on the bus, so the back row had to squeeze five people into four seats and one guy had to stand. The luggage truck had also left ahead of us, so we had to drive to Maputo all of us having huge camping backpacks on our laps. At one point during the trip our bus pulled up next to the bus of the Mambas, the Mozambican national soccer team! They were pretty cute and were nice enough to wave back at our bus of excited white people.
Last night we had a huge head-shaving party, so now there are eight girls in our group with shaved heads! Today while we were driving I had the window all the way open and was just enjoying the wind blasting my face at 70mph. I realized I have never felt that before because I have never liked to have the windows down in the car because I don’t like my hair getting messed up. But I didn’t have to worry about that today and just feeling the wind on my face like that was an amazing feeling. Once we got to our hotel we were done for the day so we spent the afternoon sitting on the beach.