How to Complicate Your Trip to Uganda

This post will be self-indulgent, solely for the purpose of me having a way to complain and fill in everyone on why I am sometimes stressed out.

1. Go to France
2. Decide the best way to go to Uganda is directly from France, without returning to the United States before the summer
3. Don’t bring anything you could possibly need in Uganda to France
4. Make sure you are very poor so that buying things for Uganda is as difficult as possible
5. If Notre Dame agrees to give you money, make sure you communicate with them via a questionable fax machine. For instance, if you send Notre Dame something at the end of March, expect an email a month later saying the papers were never received. This ensures your money will come far after you need it.
6. When booking your flight to Uganda, choose the flight out of London! It’s cheaper after all, and you’ll get to see London. You will also ensure you have to take an additional two trains and switch airports, alone, with 9 months worth of suitcases.
7. Make a travel itinerary as follows: Chicago-Paris-Angers-Paris-London-Uganda-London-Paris-Chicago.
8. Check with the airline for a flight on any day except the day you need. If there is one available only one day later, try to have it be indirect. Maybe make an extra stop in Boston (even though I love Boston, but shit, I just want to find a way to get home).
9. Consequently, your return trip from Uganda to Chicago should take at least 3 days, if you’ve followed the advice of this list so far.
10. When it comes to vaccinations, wait until the end of April to make an appointment.
11. Instead of calling the hospital, walk there yourself and get consequently lost. When you arrive at the hospital, they will laugh at you for thinking you can get a yellow fever vaccination anytime within the next month. They will tell you to go to another city.
12. Call numerous hospitals and vaccinations centers in France. Remember! They’re only open for two hours in the morning and three in the afternoon, so skip classes to make the calls! Run to one doctor’s office only to have him tell you he does not have the vaccine. Although on the phone he said he did.
13. Forget all of your vaccination information the morning you have to take a train to a neighboring city to get yellow fever and polio shots.
14. When the nurse asks you if you’ve had only a tetanus shot in the last year, tell her yes. Because you think it was only a tetanus shot. So you can have the tetanus-diptheria-polio combo, of course!
15. Upon returning home, realize your last shot was actually for tetanus AND diptheria. Realize you have made a grave medical error, and you may die at any minute. Although you have an importatnt test tomorrow.
16. Find a nurse who will call poison control for you. Despite the fear that you may now have diptheria, take comfort in the fact that you will live.
17. Show up for another vaccine appointment at the wrong time
18. Later, at the correct time, hear the doctor ask you where the vaccine is. Realize that France is basically like pioneer Alaska and you are supposed to go fetch your own vaccines, like Balto. Run around to 4 pharmacies in town, begging for a typhoid fever and hepatitis vaccine.
19. The doctor will charge you $35 for him to stick the vaccine in your arm, which you probably could have done yourself.


to be continued.....