Life is tripping along pleasantly. There is evening and there is morning. There is sun and there is cloud. There is too-hot-to-take-a-walk and then there is the fortunate realization that riding a bike involves a built-in cooling mechanism. Namely, wind. Until the way back, when the wind is in your face and you have to pedal twice as hard to get half as far. The dehydration begins to set in.
Fortunately, I headed to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant immediately afterward, where I gulped down several glasses of water and diet Coke. And then spent the rest of the night finding restrooms once the necessary hydration levels were met and exceeded. The Ethiopian food was, I have to say, at its best tonight. I have a preferred Ethiopian restaurant, because I am a snob about the injera, because it has to be made out of tef, not rice, and it must not have those lumps. I have no patience for the thick parts on bad injera. When I was in Rwanda (have I told this story 1 million times before?), when I drove to Kigali, almost weekly, I was often commissioned to pick up injera from the house of an Ethiopian family with an Ethiopian maid and bring it back to Kibuye for my friend B. Since I love and adore Ethiopian food, I would come back to Kibuye with the injera and hold it ransom until I received an invitation to help eat it. One day, looking at the wot that we were eating with the injera (ok, I was eating around the meat, anyway), I said, "Those don't look like cow bones."
"They aren't." B. said. "They are goat."
!!!
I hate goat meat. I know, I know. Not only is goat the staple meat in Rwanda, but I worked on a goat project. I refused to eat the very product I was selling. But here's the problem: there were these goats, early in my time in Rwanda. They were all crowded into a small space, and the stench was incredible. Goat has a very particular smell. I can sniff out goat a few hundred meters and several turns away. So there was this stench in the small crowded space, this incredible stench of goats, and goat meat, to me, smells like that stench. It's just not edible.
Another time, I was invited to lunch at the house of a lovely Ethiopian family in Kigali. The lunch turned out to be goat. Not wot, oh no. I can stick to the sauce in wot and just eat around the meat. Oh no, this was tibs. Tibs are essentially chunks oh meat. Sauceless chunks oh meat. For someone who dislikes goat and is practically a vegetarian but is a guest in someone's house, this is very, very painful. The family was lovely, so I had to attempt to also be a lovely person and eat the goat without making faces, which was clearly harder for me than for them. (The being lovely, I mean, not the goat-eating. I assume they liked the goat.) I am not naturally one of those people you meet and then say, "Oh, she is lovely." It's much more likely that you will say, "Man, we could NOT shut that girl up. Why was she telling all those stories about Africa? I mean, she's nice, but... Africa, Africa, Africa." But this family really was lovely, all kind and considerate. (Some people really are lovely. Others of us are naturally less graceful. We have to work at it.)
This is not at all where I intended this post to go. The point is that I ate some really excellent Ethiopian food today, even more excellent than the excellent food that this excellent restaurant normally produces, and I appreciated it even more than normal because I was tired and hungry from fighting the wind on my bike ride.
Ok.
The other point is that life is pleasant but sort of boring. It's all very nice, but things are so much the same day after day. Fortunately, I am about to embark on spending all my (already non-existent) money on trips around the world, so that should spice things up. For a week or two at a time. And hey. HEY. This is why I have less than $100 to get me through the rest of the month: priorities. I have to pay bills and eat and save a little, and after that, travel is fair game. I look at it this way: I can have a car, or I can travel. DECISION MADE. I have got to add a continent to my list this year.
I need to go to bed. I am at that stage right now that used to require Mountain Dew, back when I could stand the taste of Mountain Dew, and hey, look! Once you reach the ripe old age of 30(ish), you can become delirious without even drinking Mountain Dew. All you have to do is stay up past midnight.
Fortunately, I headed to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant immediately afterward, where I gulped down several glasses of water and diet Coke. And then spent the rest of the night finding restrooms once the necessary hydration levels were met and exceeded. The Ethiopian food was, I have to say, at its best tonight. I have a preferred Ethiopian restaurant, because I am a snob about the injera, because it has to be made out of tef, not rice, and it must not have those lumps. I have no patience for the thick parts on bad injera. When I was in Rwanda (have I told this story 1 million times before?), when I drove to Kigali, almost weekly, I was often commissioned to pick up injera from the house of an Ethiopian family with an Ethiopian maid and bring it back to Kibuye for my friend B. Since I love and adore Ethiopian food, I would come back to Kibuye with the injera and hold it ransom until I received an invitation to help eat it. One day, looking at the wot that we were eating with the injera (ok, I was eating around the meat, anyway), I said, "Those don't look like cow bones."
"They aren't." B. said. "They are goat."
!!!
I hate goat meat. I know, I know. Not only is goat the staple meat in Rwanda, but I worked on a goat project. I refused to eat the very product I was selling. But here's the problem: there were these goats, early in my time in Rwanda. They were all crowded into a small space, and the stench was incredible. Goat has a very particular smell. I can sniff out goat a few hundred meters and several turns away. So there was this stench in the small crowded space, this incredible stench of goats, and goat meat, to me, smells like that stench. It's just not edible.
Another time, I was invited to lunch at the house of a lovely Ethiopian family in Kigali. The lunch turned out to be goat. Not wot, oh no. I can stick to the sauce in wot and just eat around the meat. Oh no, this was tibs. Tibs are essentially chunks oh meat. Sauceless chunks oh meat. For someone who dislikes goat and is practically a vegetarian but is a guest in someone's house, this is very, very painful. The family was lovely, so I had to attempt to also be a lovely person and eat the goat without making faces, which was clearly harder for me than for them. (The being lovely, I mean, not the goat-eating. I assume they liked the goat.) I am not naturally one of those people you meet and then say, "Oh, she is lovely." It's much more likely that you will say, "Man, we could NOT shut that girl up. Why was she telling all those stories about Africa? I mean, she's nice, but... Africa, Africa, Africa." But this family really was lovely, all kind and considerate. (Some people really are lovely. Others of us are naturally less graceful. We have to work at it.)
This is not at all where I intended this post to go. The point is that I ate some really excellent Ethiopian food today, even more excellent than the excellent food that this excellent restaurant normally produces, and I appreciated it even more than normal because I was tired and hungry from fighting the wind on my bike ride.
Ok.
The other point is that life is pleasant but sort of boring. It's all very nice, but things are so much the same day after day. Fortunately, I am about to embark on spending all my (already non-existent) money on trips around the world, so that should spice things up. For a week or two at a time. And hey. HEY. This is why I have less than $100 to get me through the rest of the month: priorities. I have to pay bills and eat and save a little, and after that, travel is fair game. I look at it this way: I can have a car, or I can travel. DECISION MADE. I have got to add a continent to my list this year.
I need to go to bed. I am at that stage right now that used to require Mountain Dew, back when I could stand the taste of Mountain Dew, and hey, look! Once you reach the ripe old age of 30(ish), you can become delirious without even drinking Mountain Dew. All you have to do is stay up past midnight.
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