Last entry. Wow. Let's see how my memory serves.

Dinner Easter night was absolutely delicious. Chicken wings and potato wedges, not to mention Denny, David and Sigrid giving us massive amounts of chocolate, or the sweet rolls shaped like a rabbit the hotel provided. HUGE rolls. HUGE. And then there was more chocolate too... it was great.

Haiko, whose name I'm probably misspelling horribly, wanted to check out the Reeperbahn with Denny. This is an area that some of our people went to the first or second night and Hamburg, and the consistent opinion was “... interesting.”

Yeah, that's about right. Cool statue of Otto von Bismarck, though.

Eventually Haiko wanted to grab a drink, so we found an actual bar and had a round of Astras. The place was alright, trying a little hard to be glossy – fairly well lit, clean counters and coasters for your beer, American flags and pictures of dollar bills along the bottom of the bar, a saxophone in a glass case over the bar. It did have really good prices though, you could get 12 shots for only 15 euro if you wanted. Obviously, there weren't enough of us for that. We sat and talked for a while, Haiko and I had a second beer, and we headed back.

Came back, chilled in the room, whatever, bed.

Monday, decided to skip breakfast, I honestly don't remember lunch all that well. Class was long, and hilarious. David called Jake “Jason” and Kanako “Zypy.” He called Allen the expert on penises, thanks to Matt's prank on Allen's essay where he replaced a word with Penis and David's comment was something like “You've lost me here. I'm not sure of the logic behin your examples.” That had us rolling. There was a bit where we were discussing whether or not Frankenstein's monster was sterile or not, and David was saying the monster may have been mixed male and female, and I was trying to explain somatic cells vs. sex cells, and said “what's going on in your hand has nothing to do with the cells in your reproductive system” and David said “I don't know what you do with your hand, Tim” and we all just straight up died. Class was probably 4-5 hours long in all, we discussed a lot of broad, big picture stuff about the trip, no surprise. At the end David got choked up, then Zypy cried a little bit, then Nate got a little choked up. I was worried all of us would have to cry at least once before they'd let us leave.

Dinner was good, and the night was a whole lot of finishing up essays and chilling in the bar under the hotel. So we all hung out there, as people not leaving with the main group filtered off to bed there were hugs and goodbyes, that sort of thing. I was the only one who stayed up all night. I almost forgot to wake up Swaffie and had to RUN to get him like, 8 minutes before we left. They only sent one six-person taxi, rather than the three four-person or two six-person we were promised, so meh. Some quick farewells when it came back for the second wave with Swaffie, Zypy, David and Sigrid, and then it was off to the train station.

On the train we chatted, ate our lunch bags, whatever. At one point I ended up “talking” with a guy who I think was deaf, or at least mostly mute. It was a lot of hand signals and me trying to figure out hard-to-understand German. Yeah, it's even worse when it's a foreign language. I got across to him that we were flying, he said he was a photographer, I think he had SCUBAed and done photography too. He wasn't flying today, but he did other times. Then he got out a pad and marker and we talked that way, and wow. He asked if we had been to Africa, I said Tanzania. Turns out this guy was a crazy awesome world traveler. Kenya, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, I don't remember half the countries he wrote down. Markko, would that be Morocco? So I gave him the full itinerary, at least, I wrote “3 Monaten zusammen” and the list of places. He was suitably impressed. We went back and forth that way a bit, me appreciating his lengthy list of places he'd visited, and then it was time for him to go. Gave him a handshake on the way out, and he grinned and waved at the whole group as he walked past the window. I think he was really happy to have that short “talk,” and man, what a cool guy, you know?

So, airport, needing to pee horribly because of downing my orange pop, Allen's orange pop, and my water, getting tickets, security was surprisingly easy. I had to get patted down because of my shoes though, then I was selected for a random check where they took a sample from outside my backpack and ran it through a device. For gunpowder and explosive powder, maybe?

Plane to London Heathrow, as hard as I've slept in my entire life, no surprise there. I had been up for something like 20 hours after all. Barely made it off the plane, then London Heathrow. Normally a miserable airport, but we actually had a pretty easy time of it. I got selected for a random check again. It's happened to me a lot this trip. Never travel with a beard, eh? Denny's bag had to be fully examined, real fun there. We went on, got our passes, I took a nap for 20 minutes or so until the gate was listed and Vince woke me up by tugging on my lizard. At the gate, we got asked about if we had had our bags or if anyone had given us anything. I haven't been asked those questions by a real live human being this entire trip, I think. It reminded me of flying as a little kid. Yeah, I know, to some of you I'm still a little kid. I mean littler.

So then about half of the people entering the gate had to be patted down, pockets emptied, shoes checked, soles of feet checked, and bags examined. I'm glad they didn't make me TOTALLY do my backpack, the guy commented on me not having a stein like Jake and I said “you can see, I don't have any room left.” He was pretty friendly, in fairness. So we went through that, and here I am now. Slept a little bit, ate some pretty good pasta, watched “Fantastic Mr. Fox” which I actually really liked, and worked on my prompt a bit. Denny told me last night that most people tell him too much, I'm “parsimonious” with my thoughts and play it close to the chest. Amused me.

Man. Next time I get off a plane I'll be in the United States for the first time since middle of January. The next time I leave an airport I'll be in Cleveland for the first time in three months. It's truly bizarre. The trip has felt like so much more than three months, I'd practically believe I was gone for a year. At first I was just super excited to get home, but the last three or so days it started to catch up with me. I'm still looking forward to seeing everyone, but it's just hard to believe the trip was over. We were talking about how we felt like we were just going on to the next destination, the Amazon must come next, right? Airports mean another new biome, not where we live and grew up. It's gonna be a huge change of pace getting OUT of the biomes routine, though I hope a few of the good habits stick with me. At least, that's the goal. I'm glad I'm traveling a bit right when I get home, Greyhounding to visit a friend and then to a PeaceJam. It'll help stave off the culture shock. May though... three weeks in one place, with a dresser, and classes in a classroom and stuff? It's going to be very odd.

Anyway, that's enough of my thoughts. I'm sure most of you stopped reading this thing some time back in Tanzania when you realized my writing wasn't getting any shorter. I hope you all enjoyed, regardless. This is me signing off. I've on-and-off considered continuing this thing in some other format, but no, if I maintain any sort of blog when I get home (even if it's about the after-effects of the trip), it'll be a separate blog under the same profile. This place should serve as a document of the experience, and the experience alone. Yeah, of course, the experience doesn't exactly “stop” here, it's going to keep coming up again and again for years, probably the rest of my life. But... call it the end of a chapter so that another may begin.

As the French say, and as David said to us yesterday afternoon: bon voyage.

Tuesday, April 6th, roughly 3:20-3:45 PM local time