Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Kilimanjaro

I'm on the plane home now, somewhere over the ocean between Athens and Rome, and the short breath and stunning glaciers are turning into a bit if a hazy memory, but this picture says otherwise.

The first Westerner to hike it was a German professor from the university of Leipzig in 1889. It took him no fewer than 6 weeks to make the ascent. It's a marvel of modernity that I can hike it all in 6 days (though it's more like 5, since we left at noon and got back at 11am).

In any event, it's a magical place—the locals used to climb it to commune with God, and there they found a cold, mysterious, magical white powder that turned into water when they tried to remove it from the mountain. Crazy times. Crazy place.

19,340ft above sea level I stood on monday morning at 7am. 10am on Friday morning I'll be in JD orientation at Harvard Law School—what a contrast. Hopefully jet lag isn't too bad coming home!

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