Back to the US of A

I am becoming a more anxious traveler as I get older. What is up with that? Anyway, it was finally time to head back to the U.S. to catch up with my committee, head to a conference in Anaheim, and get some broomball in. Retracing my steps, I went from Nairobi to Amsterdam to Minneapolis. Let me take a moment to reiterate how joyous it is to only have one layover of four hours?

As I mentioned in a an earlier post, 9/11 changed a lot in the world of international travel. One of those is the incessant document checking. Between Nairobi and Minneapolis, I had five, almost six, different people look at my documents. I boarded two planes. Two. With that kind of scrutiny, it amazes me that someone can make it into the U.S. and get deported because of incorrect documents.

The first document check is when you enter the Nairobi airport. KLM staff people do that check. Then you go through passport control. Then before you get to the final boarding area, your documents are looked at again by none other than the KLM you just saw downstairs. The next document check was by far the most tedious and I am glad I had 5 hours to kill because two of them were spent standing in line. The plane were around 400 passengers on the NBO-AMS flight. Security in Amsterdam checked all our passports. Every. Single. Person. Just for good measure, before you get on the next plane, you have a private interview with another security (The lady I spoke with was actually very nice and even spoke a little Swahilli). Then just before you get onto the plane, there wee security people randomly picking people from the line and checking their documents again. Luckily, I was not among the randomly selected people.

Kisumu City

I want to finish in the next millennium so I chose to limit my research area to the Kenyan part of the Lake Victoria Basin in the western side of the country. Kisumu is the largest town in that area and will be my base. I spent the remainder of my time getting to know the town better. It is close to where both parents are from so I also spent time catching up with family who I had not seen in a while.