Introductions (or, relevant size considerations)

Allow me to briefly ruminate about size.

Madison county, Alabama (my home)(God's country) is roughly 805 sq miles in area. The island nation of Mauritius is roughly 720 sq miles in area. The total distance of my journey was just over 17,000 miles in length. My name is Miles. I just moved to Mauritius. I'm also roughly 6 feet 2 inches in height. I would tell you how tall Mauritians are, but every time that I ask they answer me in a foreign language, and by foreign language I obviously mean the metric system. I'm here to study at the University of Mauritius. I'll study things that I find fascinating and that my father finds irrelevant, but isn't that what college is supposed to be like anyway?

 My first flight departed from the Huntsville International Airport at 1 pm on July 25. It was supposed to leave an hour earlier. From there I went to Houston, where Amy came and made me buy her pizza. Then I got on another plane and didn't get off for what seemed like a geological era. I was, quite frankly, surprised to find that when I landed in Dubai my passport hadn't expired. I was up in the air for a seriously long time. The Dubai airport is huge. In my over-educated opinion, I would probably say that if it were moved to the island of Mauritius, the island would sink into the Indian Ocean. Also huge was my plane. A Boeing 777. I spent eight hours in the airport in Dubai. In these eight hours I heard the Muslim call to prayer twice. I also heard "The Climb" by Miley Cyrus over two separate sets of airport loudspeakers. These two things must be cosmically linked. 

 I boarded my plane to Mauritius at 3 am Dubai/Mauritius time. The two are in the same time zone, but do not be fooled. Though the two places have a similar longitude, their latitudes are quite different, another-seven-hours-on-a-plane different. And then I spent another two waiting in lines at customs. I can appreciate the slower pace of life. I cannot appreciate the slower pace of lines. My taxi driver met me outside the airport. I felt incredibly important, as he was holding a sign with my name. I felt less important when he could not even begin to pronounce it. For what it's worth, I couldn't pronounce his either. In any event, we struck off from the airport to Port Louis on the absolute other end of the island. Total travel time: 35 minutes. With traffic. Before arriving at my hotel, he stopped twice. Once to buy me a beer for the road- much appreciated. The other time we stopped so that he could show me a furnished apartment that his uncle owned. It was nice, but too far from campus. I also met his cousin, whose name I could not pronounce.

Of my giant first week checklist I've managed to accomplish two things. One: register with American embassy. Two: Open a bank account (with extreme difficulty). Next I have to acquire a cell phone and a permanent residence.

Also, in case I hadn't mentioned it before, this place is absolutely beautiful and exactly what I was hoping it would be. Furthermore, I would like to thank two people who will likely never see this: Priyam, my lovely banker woman who bent more than one rule to accommodate me, and the cleaning lady at my hotel who smiled at me this morning. Merci.