LOOONNNNDDDOOOONNNNN!!!!!

Oh my goodness, it feels soooooooooo good to be back in London! I've been on cloud nine for the past two days. Even the stress/annoyance of having to work on my research project write-up isn't getting me down. Oh, and I got my final exam grades: I did decently well! I was confident that I had passed, but I was worried that I might have received the lowest passing grade (a 2). But I got the equivalent of a B or B- (hard to say because this school uses a weird system).

I met up with Holly and Alex a couple hours after arriving and it was so wonderful to see them. I walked to Carluccio's from school to meet them, and I couldn't help smiling as I walked. I never smile while walking! Ever! (People might think I'm a crazy person, and I wouldn't want that.) I really really love these girls. Alex managed to get scabies while in Africa (HAHAHAHAHA!) and when I touched her arm, a scab came off. It makes me laugh to think about it. So funny and disgusting, I love it.

The room that I got at the residence hall is so much better than my old room! I mean, the room itself is more or less exactly the same, but it's on the 1st floor (the 2nd floor in America) and it gets much more light than my old room. Not that my old room was dark, but it was on the ground floor and the other buildings in the courtyard I looked out onto were much closer than in my new room. I can leave my window opened or leave my computer in view of the window without worrying about anyone breaking in (not that break-ins are common, just that I'm paranoid). And the bathroom tiles are prettier in this room. My last one had horrible floor tiles that always looked filthy no matter how hard you scrubbed them. Holly and I washed them with bleach and they still looked filthy. The one draw-back is that there is no full-length mirror in this room. This becomes a real issue in a country where you can't use hair dryers in the bathroom. Did you know that about England? You will never find an English person using a hair dryer or straighteners in their bathroom. It's unheard of. They don't believe in having outlets in bathrooms, except low voltage ones for electric razors. Silly English people.

Carina arrived today and she and Alex and I had lunch together (burritos from Benito's Hat, mmmmm.) It's good to have the old gang back together. I feel like it's been ages, but it really hasn't been that long. Well, I guess it has. I haven't been apart from these guys for more than three weeks since the day I met them.

Now to get back to the project. My supervisor said I need to change the names of the villages my data is based on, but I don't know how to do that. Alex gave me a couple cute Swahili names, but I feel like I should use the local language, which I don't speak. In Swahili, they name towns after the people who live in them, like "the people who like giraffes" or "the people who fish." If I knew how to construct names like that in Luganda, that would be cool, but I don't. Poo.

Here are pictures of Murchison Falls National Park. I'm quite proud of a couple of them, like these ones: