We are on the first leg of our journey back to the States for two weeks. We're going for my brother's wedding. They started dating the week we arrived in Mozambique, so it's a little weird to be welcoming someone into the family whom I've never met and that lives closer to my parents than I do. We'll get to meet my future sister-in-law about 24 hours before the wedding in her house where my brother is moving into.

Nonetheless we are traveling to the wedding. In typical Mozambican style, we came into Beira this morning. We caught a chapa in Chimoio headed to Beira and I think we were the last ones on because within 5 minutes of finding our seats, the bus left. Joel sat in a seat that folded down into the isle. I had the cramped seat in the back of the bus--the fifth person in a row meant for four. But of course, the row did not only have 5 adults, it also had 3 children. The seat in front of me was so close that I could not fully sit down, so the most comfortable position was almost the fetal position, with my right elbow resting on my leg, supporting my head from the bumps and the seat in front of me. Every time we stopped (police check points, buying things at a market, etc), I tried to stand up to adjust my legs. The two women with the three children got off first. The elderly woman sitting next to me, who was just as cramped as me, smiled with me as we unwound our bodies from the tight places. I was very thankful that we were only going to Beira and not somewhere very far away, like Quelimane (9 hours) or Maputo (17 hours).

Tomorrow morning we will catch a "luxury" bus to Maputo (Mozambique's capital city--we're anxious to see what it's like because the images we see of it on TV are completely different than the Mozambique we know). It's an express bus that supposedly goes from Beira to Maputo in one day. The schedule says we leave at 5 AM and get into Maputo at 20:00, but our experience in Moz tells us that it will be longer than that. Brooke said when she took that busline, she got to Maputo at 2:30 in the morning. I'm praying we'll be there sooner than that. This is a "luxury" bus line--meaning, everyone gets their own seat (no 5 people for 4 seats), there's air conditioning, and the luggage is in storage under the bus and not under everyone's seat. I wonder what it will feel like to have that much space after spending the past year on crowded chapas.