I've arrived!

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
     flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln 
     went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy 
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers. 

- Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

It's been a very long day - two days really - but I and the other 17 students on the program have made it safely to Egypt!
We met as a group for the first time in JFK airport and had a few hours to kill ("Hi!  I'm Helen!  Where do you go to school?  What's your major? Have you taken Arabic before?").  The 7 hour flight was long and hard, and the 5 hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany wasn't exactly fun, but once we got on the plane from Frankfurt, destination Cairo, it all felt real.  I sat next to a really interesting guy from Seattle who was on his way to Alexandria to build boats for the Egyptian Navy - he was covered with tattoos and had some crazy ear piercings, but he and I both squealed like little children as we finally came back down under the clouds and saw Cairo for the first time.
And saw the Nile.  I swear, to see that river with my own eyes was the tonic to all my aches, pains and tiredness.  The ancientness and the epic scope of that ribbon of green water, cutting through ancient temples and modern slums, brought home to me what it is that I'm doing here....
...I can't verbalize it yet, but I know now that I am here, that I have truly arrived, that I ought to be here, and that I am in for a hell of a year.

"Like Nilus, it disdaineth bounds."
                  - W. Shakespeare, "Antony & Cleopatra"