So. Very. Tired.

Actually, I think we'll all be feeling a lot better by 7:15 a.m. Windhoek time (the same time, incidentally, as London time) when we step off our 2nd flight. The key to being comfortable anywhere is two-fold:

1) Be so very exhausted that you are scarcely even aware of your surroundings. John McMillan and I noticed around 8:30, waiting for our flight to board last night, that the table between us, the chairs under us, and the floor on which our feet rested were all gently listing back and forth. It was sort of fun -- like being on a cruise ship with less fatty food and more warnings about leaving baggage unattended. Kim Denis, among others, started to look like one of the lost children off the side of a milk carton around 7 p.m. last night, and kept fading until we started to seriously contemplate throwing her over our shoulders like an overgrown toddler, just to get her safely on the plane.

2) Be so very uncomfortable that any conditions that are even slightly more bearable become welcoming and luxurious. For example, once you've been crammed between the metal armrests of a wooden airport lounge chair for three hours, you will sigh with relief when you get to stand up and stagger down the corridor towards your gate. And then, once you've clambered up and down escalator after escalator with your 5 kg carry-on bag hanging off your shoulder, you'll gladly welcome the chance to sit down again in yet another uncomfortable and hideous boarding lounge chair. And, last of all, when you spent the 10 hours of your previous flight crammed into inhumanly tiny and close-spaced seats, you'll sprawl out in your two-inches-wider and one-inch-deeper seat on the second flight and pronounce to anyone who is awake enough to hear you that this is the best place you've ever been in your entire life!

Thanks to the above-mentioned conditions, I think most of us caught a good five to seven hours of much-needed sleep on this leg of the journey (but I'm still too tired to figure out what that works out to in Bamboo Pole Equivalency time) and we'll be walking into the little Windhoek airport a much happier (if increasingly smellier) bunch. We'll be off to our first hotel (first beds in 3 days, yay!) at the Roof of Africa Inn, where I hope to be able to post the entries I've been saving up. We'll shower, change, brush our teeth, and (I'm sure) collapse for another few hours before we meet for our first rehearsal. All in all, a pretty relaxing day while we revel in the fact that we made it! We're in Africa!