cheating

Last night I played darts with my friend S. and her brother N. in one of those smoky bars that leave smoke seeping out of your pores for days, even if you never held a cigarette. S. knows what she's doing, and N. used to be the darts champion of his neighborhood bar in Korea (they gave him his own set of darts, kept in a shot glass behind the counter for him), and I, they tell me, throw a dart like one would throw a baseball, with too much arm. I think it's necessary just to tell you upfront that I lost. I didn't lose that badly, but that was mostly the result of the fact that I took some extra "practice" rounds while S. was in the bathroom and when I accidentally hit a triple 15 and an 18, exactly what I needed, N. let me put them on the board. (Shhhhhh!) I'm a total feminist and stuff, but sometimes it's nice to be the wimpy girl who can't throw. And therefore is allowed to cheat.

evening ramble

I am sitting around feeling all accomplished of a Friday evening, because this week I managed to do two long-dreaded things: call my student loan company (hate, hate) and change some things on my mobile phone plan. Except I don't think we call them mo-bile phones here. Do we? The rest of the world does. Anyway. My cell phone plan. I now have the correct address in there, the correct credit card number in there, and a text messaging plan that saves me a frighteningly large amount of money. I have never been a big texter, until this month, when I started working all day long in an office, which makes it hard to answer my phone. Now I text all the time, because this is how you communicate in 3.2 seconds while running up the stairs in heels. While simultaneously eating lunch. No time for calling, so vital information must be passed as quickly as possible. I've been intending to get a texting plan for a week or two, but didn't get around to it until today, by which time I had rung up a total of 301 text messages since the 10th. At twenty cents each, that is... $60. Seriously impressive wastage of money. Good thing they retroactivated it, or I would have cried when I got the bill. Really, truly. I am not pulling in an extra $60 a month (no! that was half a month!) for texting these days.

So, um...

um...

The weather is nice!

Yes, I am that boring these days.

Oh, funny story. Sadly, to get funny stories I have to harken back to my traveling days of March, although I was reminded of it by the fact that my sister was just telling me about how people steal things from hotels. She works at a hotel.

I was on a plane from London to Rome to Addis Ababa and the guy sitting across the aisle from me was 1. clearly Ethiopian (language, etc.), and 2. clearly crazy. He demonstrated point two by praying loudly and nonsensically and by variously proclaiming to the flight attendant and me (despite my headphones and not looking at him) that he 1. is Portuguese because he loves Mozambique, 2. loves Ethiopian Airlines, and 3. STEALS A BLANKET FROM THE PLANE EVERY TIME HE FLIES ON ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES. Does it seem smart to tell a flight attendant on Ethiopian Airlines that, essentially, you have stolen and probably plan to steal numerous blankets? Does it?

Now I shall go find something fun to do.

Memo

To: Cashier

Yes, I did check for "breakage among [my] little eggs."

Please never say that again.

Thank you.

random segue into a travelogue

Cheap thrills, people. I'm all about the cheap thrills right now. I expended all my money and more going to Ethiopia. (Hi, Mom and Dad! I have not forgotten the $1000 I owe you! Happy Birthday, Mom!) Currently, I am relegated to tea on the couch as a happening Tuesday evening activity. Total cost: approximately 9 cents. This is fun! Come to think of it, it's still better than last week's Tuesday evening activity: the joyous doing of the taxes. One good thing I have to say about having a real live 8-5 job is that when it's over, it's over. I can come home and watch Jon & Kate Plus Eight (WHAT? YOU KNOW YOU DO THAT, TOO. Or you wish you could) and go to bed. Technically, I should be doing the elliptical at night, but I work in a building with seven floors, any of which I might have to be on at any time, and I refuse to take the elevator, so if I don't feel like the elliptical of an evening, well, shoot me. Plus I do all those stairs in heels, which I think gets me extra stair-climbing points. Or something.

Actually, sitting and drinking tea is not that fundamentally different from what I prefer to do anywhere in the world. When I was in Ethiopia? Basically all I did was wander around looking for the nearest place to sit and drink a macchiato. The guidebook was all, "Awassa is great! You can see hippos! And other cool things!" and I walked along the lake and then I was tired and I got a drink and sat by the water with my drink, until a bird poo'd on me, mostly missing me, and then I got fed up with the lake and walked into town until I found a cafe, and then I drank a macchiato and ate cake. For lunch. I talked to the hippo boat people, but they wanted $15 for the ride, even though there were already four people in the boat, and they would not bargain, and I have seen hippos before, hippos galore, so I sat and drank my Sprite instead. And then my macchiato. And that cake. And possibly ate some ice cream. That part of the gorging is all a little vague.

Here is a photo of a macchiato:

Man, those things are delicious. Also, one of the best things about Ethiopia is that every tiny little town has an espresso machine and can produce these delicious little delicacies (am I repeating myself here?). This particular macchiato was not in Awassa, however, even though Awassa was my favorite town in Ethiopia. It was in Gorgora, a little town on the north shore of Lake Tana, for those in the know and to whom the phrase "north shore of Lake Tana" has any meaning.

In addition to seeking out coffee, I sought out juice. It's sort of embarrassing how much of my time in Ethiopia I spent in cafes, but I shall excuse it by claiming that this is the best way to see a country, like, a country for reals. Not just the tourist part. This is pineapple juice. Pineapple juice is often, if good and fresh, a little too sweet. In Gonder, though, the cafe I liked best would give me a lime or lemon to squeeze into it. Serious, serious bliss.

And, just for fun, here is a picture of MY BUTT. I know, very juvenile. But I don't post face pictures here, so what is left?

That's in Gonder. Castles, etc.

(P.S. Ethiopia pictures are up on facebook. Fie-nail-ee.)

on a changeable saturday afternoon

I miss that stomach that I had back when I was a teenager, the one that could eat Nacho Cheesier Doritos and drink Mountain Dew for breakfast in the back seat of a fifteen-passenger van at the beginning of the drive to a service project. Now I drink a mug of mint hot chocolate (as I just did) and I'm slightly queasy by the end (as I now am). I can pinpoint when it happened: that summer in Liberia. I started the summer with a teenager's impermeable stomach and I ended it with an adult's stomach that prompts that oft-repeated warning, "You'll get sick if you eat all that sugar!" This is, frankly, not true for kids. They can eat all the sugar in the city and still feel fine. I, however, no longer can.

...

My friend R., up from Berkeley, and I walked down to a breakfast place this morning. She had eggs and potatoes with strange spiral fiddlehead ferns (she had heard of them, I had not) and I had a Belgian waffle. We drank coffee and talked about the million things people who were college floor-mates ten years ago have to catch up on. It was sunny when we left and a few blocks later it started hailing on us, although most of the sky was still perfect blue. We laughed at the insanity that is spring in the Pacific Northwest, and stopped at a little store full of items that someone from various parts of Asia might miss if they came to the US: tea bowls, little plastic storage containers, noodles of a million sorts, mochi frozen and not, strips of spiced fish, little pink Hello Kitty purses. I bought incense sticks and she bought mango gummy candy that she passed out to me on the walk home. I tried to eat it slowly, but I ended up chomping it.

(apparently) weekly recap

Somehow, I forgot to file my tax returns prior to April 15. Well, I didn't forget. I remembered that they were due, but I couldn't open Adobe documents on my computer because of some classic computer idiocy and I spent my weekend in a somewhat stuporous state of joy over having (ding ding!) ** passed the bar exam** (we can talk about it now) and also it was sunny and beautiful that weekend and I managed to coerce someone with a car into leaving the city to go hiking in prettiness, so I was forced to work on taxes during my lunch hour on April 15, annoying surrounding colleagues with statements about how Michigan has no RIGHT to my money, seeing as how I made it all in New York and/or Southern Sudan, and then when I got home that night I had to remove all Adobe products (failures, all of them) from my computer and re-install them, and then it was 9:30 p.m. before I finished the forms for the feds, MI, and NY (partial year residencies: disastrous). So I opened up the handy little trip planning device on the public transportation website and betook myself, at 10:00 p.m., in the constant sprinkle, back downtown to drop my tax forms in the mailbox outside the central post office, where items mailed before midnight would get an April 15 stamp.

As I was standing at the homeward bus stop at 10:30 p.m., a creepy short little middle-aged man passed me and said hello. I nodded back (at this point, I didn't know that he was creepy; he looked normal). Then he asked me my name in a leering tone and I utilized the world-tested strategy of glancing at him and then away in utter disinterest as if he was the most boring specimen of humanity ever to pass before my eyes. (You would be shocked. This strategy of finding the person utterly boring works even in the parts of the world where "leave me alone" apparently means "please try to stick your hand up my shirt in a public place." It's brilliant.)

Slightly relatedly, I have started to notice that I say the word hello to people exactly like my dad does. People are mad friendly out here, and while hiking on Saturday, we routinely said hi to people passing us up or down. I found myself not saying hi but saying "hello," in exactly my dad's vocal cadence. It was like it was not even my own mouth speaking. Freaky.

Another funny thing: for the first time in a long time, I am perfectly happy to be where I am. I love my apartment, I love my job, I love my friends (old and new), I love the spring blossoms on the trees, I love dressing in a suit and clicky heels, I love how nice people are, I love riding public transportation, I love all the people my age in this city, I love being done with studying, I love the glimpses of summer coming, I love exploring this state. This is a really good place for me.

I have had this conversation too many times.

Scene: karaoke bar, 2:15 a.m. Someone is singing a horribly sappy song about love and heartbreak and I turn around to stare at the screen to catch the true horror of the words. When I look back, my friend is singing along mockingly.

"Do you KNOW this song?" I ask.

"Of course. Everyone knows this song."

"Not me. I don't know this song." I say.

"How can you NOT KNOW this song?"

"Well," I ask, "is it from the 80s?"

"Of course."

"I missed the 80s."

thorn

I don't have a car, so I take the bus and the train everywhere, at least until my bike gets tuned up. Today I had a meeting in another town down the way, which was the first time I had seen any town in this state but this one. I could have borrowed a car, but the bus stops right in front of my work and relieves me from paying for parking. I took the afternoon off and caught a bus along a winding road through forests of trees draped in vines and along a bluff above a river. I began to see why this area is considered so beautiful. (What I've seen prior to this... well, a city is a city is a city.) On the way home, pondering all that I had learned during said meeting, I noticed that my finger hurt, on the side. When I looked, I saw that I had another thorn.

The thorns, which I have been taking out of my skin since four weeks ago in Gonder, attacked as I was climbing that mountain that I previously described. My choices were 1. grab thorn bushes, or 2. fall off the side of a mountain. 1. was a fairly natural choice, but those thorns are still working their way to the surface of my skin an entire month later.

i interrupt my early night of sleep for this broadcast

I'm not quite sure who it was that authorized letting me loose on the world, but I think my release upon the earth was negligent and should be revoked. Also, that person should lose their loosing license. This morning I mailed two checks to pay two bills. At some point during the day, I realized that I forgot to seal the envelopes. Nice work, that. Anyone want to steal my identity? Anyone? Anyone? Here, HAVE IT.

I'm working a normal person schedule right now, and I'm blown away by how exhausted I am all the time. I have no idea how people live this way. And really, seriously, I have no idea how they manage to do anything but work. I can't. I get up at 6 a.m. and ride the bus to work and work all day and come home and fall over with exhaustion, scarcely to move again until 6 a.m. the next day. (Part of this may have something to do with the fact that, as recently I figured out, I need to bring more food with me during the day and just forget completely about that nice idea of a hot meal when I get home. I am just way too tired and hungry to cook when I get home so I eat whatever I can find and then I still have a hypoglycemia headache all evening from the extreme dip in blood sugar that occurred approximately between 4 and 6 p.m. Might as well resign myself to some years of eating all cold food.)

I was talking to another lawyer (ha! I just said another! lawyer! no, the bar results are not out. don't ask me about them. I'll fill you in if/when I want to talk about it). Anyway, I was talking to another lawyer today, who had done some international work prior to settling in Gone West, and he talked about feeling like there was a ceiling in international work that he could not break through unless he had some practical legal experience first. "See!" I wanted to say, "That's what I meant! THAT is what I MEANT." Only of course he had no idea what I meant because he hasn't been listening to me rant for the last few months about how I need U.S. legal experience even if (when) I want to work overseas again. Mostly, I like to tell people that I felt like I needed to work in the US for a while to understand my own legal system before (if ever) I go tell other countries what to do with theirs, that I felt like it would be arrogant, right out of law school (okay, ever), to presume to tell other countries what to do with their legal systems. (Many, if not most international legal positions, even INTERNSHIPS, involve some sort of advising/consulting.) But I have to admit, having some US legal experience will be good for me and my CV, as well.

plane obsession

I spent my entire Saturday morning watching videos online of planes landing at scary airports. While I am quite possibly the only person reading this who is this obsessed with airplanes (must get a decent job so I can afford to learn to fly), I love this video of the landing at Tegucigalpa's Toncontin Airport in Honduras. The plane flies in through the mountains, turns 180 degrees at the end of the runway, and is on the ground before the turn is actually finished. Every time I've flown in there (um, three times?), I have sat on the left side of the plane - the side that points down during the 180 degree turn, and therefore stares at the ground coming up toward you, sideways and really fast. Rumor had it that the pilots were required to fly down in an empty plane and practice for a while before they could actually land. Rumor also has it that 757s are the biggest planes that are allowed to fly in there for fear of bigger ones being unable to stop by the end of the runway, the second (?) shortest international runway in the world.

utter confusion

When I worked in Tanzania, we rode dalla-dallas every day, little 16 or so seat minibuses that were filled with as many people as could sit in the seats, stand hunched over in the aisle, squish onto the bump over the engine, or hang out the door. We never did know the word for the guy who called the destinations ("'Jirojirojiro!") and took the money, so we called him the bus pimp. He's pimping out the destination and trying to attract customers.

Bus pimps in every country call out the names of their destinations quickly and the words always run together. As it turns out, this makes the words, "Mexico" and "Meskel" sound identical. It also turns out that there are both a Mexico Square and a Meskel Square in Addis. It further turns out that even someone who speaks English will not understand a US American who tries to distinguish between the two. This is how I ended up, on my second day in Ethiopia, being kicked out of a minibus by numerous people, all proclaiming loudly that, YES, this was Mexko Square, get out of the BUS already, we need to go.

I had absolutely no idea where I was. I could have been in another country for all I knew. (The day before, it had taken so long to get to my friends' house that I started wondering if I was going to end up back in Sudan - clearly not, because Ethiopia is a very large country, but I was beginning to wonder). And I was decidedly not at any square. I know a square when I see one, and I was not at a square, but on a normal road, with shops and a sidewalk and a petrol station (fine, a gas station. I find it nearly impossible to think in American English while in other countries). I had never seen Meskel Square before in my life, but on the map, it was big, and where I was standing, at MEXICO Quasi-Square-That-Is-Not-a-Square, there was nothing resembling what I knew Meskel Square had to be.

I found my way, of course. After ducking into two internet cafes to surreptitiously check the guidebook and walking the length of the road linking the two "squares", I finally came upon a 14 lane wide road (un-be-leee-vable in Africa) and an amphitheatre that looked much more like my vision of Meskel Square. Which it was. And there was an International Women's Day ceremony going on, UNIFEM and rallying cries and all. Note to self: in the future, when coming from the west in Addis, ask for Bole Road, not Meskel Square. I am fairly certain that I recall reading that Meskel Square used to be called something else, possibly until very recently, and it seems clear that the new name has not yet sunk into the collective consciousness.

beginning to recap

I realized that I've been not posting because I was trying to figure out how much to say - or not - about the whole Ethiopian men thing. I am tempted to spill out a ream of stories so that it's clear that I'm not just stereotyping Ethiopian men, but I think I'm not going to tell the worst of them for fear of descending into ranting or tedium. Just realize that when I tell a story and you think, "Hm, she seems a little on edge about Ethiopian men," there are very good reasons behind that, like constant, threatening harassment. We will just leave it at this: although there were no attempts at actual physical touching, the verbal harassment, particularly the language used, was such that I did not feel safe walking on the street at high noon in several towns I visited.

Moving on.

On the day I arrived in Addis Ababa, I took a taxi around the Ring Road to the empty house of some Ethiopian friends of mine who live in Rwanda. It was quite probably the oldest car in which I have ever sat, and it was missing such things as head rests and seatbelts (not that the seatbelts had been removed, but that the car was old enough to have never had them). The car puttered up hills very, very slowly, and when we finally got to the top of the hill, we sat in the car in the sun waiting for the person to come with the key. I didn't have a phone, so the taxi driver waited with me (and then proceeded to attempt to overcharge dramatically me despite severe bargaining, but that's unimportant). I was so incredibly delighted to be in Africa, sitting in the sun, warming myself after a cold, stressful winter.

When I opened the back door to get something out of my bag, I slammed it on my hand and scrapped up two fingers but good. Then I sort of looked at them without caring. I scoff at injuries. Blood was oozing out between my pinkie and ring finger. I shrugged and kept my hand away from anything light colored. I thought vaguely about the fact that some people might say that it's important to clean injuries that happen in new parts of Africa, where the diseases might be different than the ones my body is accustomed to fighting off, but I am generally completely unconcerned about minor diseases like infections and stomach problems (other than that fifteen-month long one. seriously. ice cream from the street carts in Liberia - particularly that one at Harbel - was a serious mistake.). I never did bother to clean that door-inflicted wound, and it healed just fine.

Later, I walked down the hill looking for internet. I passed little girls in school uniforms who giggled behind their hands at me, and a grove of eucalyptus trees that smelled like mountains. The two men and one woman staffing a tiny corner shop full of children's clothes but empty of customers (I don't know how customers would have fit, anyway) gave me suggestions about internet places. I took a minibus down the Ring Road and then back up it, paying minute amounts of birr (one, two) each time. I sat on the balcony and watched the sun set over a city lighting up for the evening.

I went to sleep under a quilt under a ceiling that was occupied by rats. I had been warned about the rats in the ceiling, but I didn't much care after 36 hours on planes. I listened to them scuffling around. I took a melatonin to convince my body that it really was nighttime. And then I slept in a real, non-moving bed.

not a morning person

I left the Netherlands early Thursday morning. I had to be at the airport at 6:30 a.m., so my aunt and uncle and I woke up at 5 a.m. I raced about readying myself and packing for 25 minutes and at about 5:25 I finished braiding my hair (couldn't wash it; wanted to conserve water) and turned the lock to open the bathroom door. It's hard to explain this lock; it is old-fashioned and looks something like a deadbolt, but with a little sliding piece that goes into the door frame and seems to be connected to the knob by a spring. I turned the knob, and it turned, and then it just kept turning and turning. Without opening the lock. So I pulled on the little sliding piece, trying to pry it out of the frame, but the spring was still in there somewhere, albeit not connected to the knob, and keeping the sliding piece locked.

I looked around for any useful utensils for prying, but there were none. I started knocking on the door. I was up a floor from my uncle and aunt, and they thought I was packing, so it took a while for them to realize that the knocking was not clattering about but actual need for assistance. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do. The gap under the door was too narrow for any tools to be passed to me, the hinges were on my side of the door, and the nail file and scissors to which they directed me were useless in attacking the lock.

Then suddenly my uncle went off down the stairs. "Where is he going?" I asked through the door. "To get a ladder," my aunt said.

And so I climbed, in my socks, in the dark, over a slippery wet roof covered with clay roofing tiles and down a cold metal ladder, before six a.m. I have to say that I still made it into the car by 5:46, only one minute after our intended departure time.

I just keep hoping that I left the window far enough open that Oom C. could get back into the bathroom, since we had to leave it open to go to the airport. I thought he was saying to close the window, but he turned out to be saying NOT to close it, so that it wouldn't be locked.

It was the start of a really long day, is all I'm going to say about the ridiculous, needless delays and cancellations and lost luggage and the fact that Northwest Airlines has lost all sense of customer service and I will be paying extra to avoid them in the future unless they provide some serious compensation in response to the angry letter I am composing. I got to my parents' house in Michigan more than 24 hours after I left C. and D.'s house in the Netherlands. And only 10-11 of those hours were flying. And 6 extra of them were spent in the armpit hair of the armpit of the earth that is the B Terminal at the Detroit Wayne County Airport. (I hate that airport. Have I given my rant here yet about how they invented the hub and spoke system for a reason and there was no good reason to abandon that and turn an airport into one interminably long tube? No? Well, you are in for a treat someday when I get around to it.) And my luggage got to my parents' house much later even than I did, for no reason but sheer airline incompetence.

Somehow, though, I made it back to Gone West, extremely sleep deprived and having been resident in 4 different time zones across a span of ten of them in less than five days. Now I have a chaos of bike, in pieces, and various strewnnesses of Ethiopian scarves across my apartment, and somehow I have to sleep and work on a Pacific Daylight Time schedule when my internal clock thinks day is night and night is day.

I might be seriously regretting having left Ethiopia.

explication

So, I've been gone. The fundamental problem was that I spent about four days irrately furious with Ethiopian men for being like Latin men instead of like African men. That is, for being catcallers instead of nice human beings. What would I have written during that time, "I hate Ethiopian men?" Because that's about all I had to say until I reprogrammed my head to be used to it and to ignore them completely. And then I fell in with some very nice US American people who took me in and gave me a raging social life for the last three days I was in Ethiopia, which was so much fun that I neglected to do anything relating to the internet. And then I flew to the Netherlands and if the choice is between y'all and a cup of tea by the fire while the snow swirls down outside (snow! in the Netherlands! at the end of March! - "March does what it wills," my aunt keeps telling me)... well. I think you would make the same decision. But as of tomorrow I'll be back in the US with stories galore to share. Now I'm off to help with dinner.

I've been sucked in by the internet. I'm intending to go south of Addis Ababa today, but it's 10:30 and I'm playing on the addicting high speed internet.

The original plan was to stay this week in Lalibela, famous home of 10 churches carved down into the rock (accessed by tunnels and trenches). Unfortunately, Lalibela is also the home of unbelievable number of young men who will not leave you alone, with the phrases "I love you!" and "Do you need a husband?" featuring prominently next to rather more vulgar ones. I visited the churches (one afternoon) and then I rode a mule/climbed up to a set of cliff churches (one morning and half an afternoon), and then I had done everything there was to do within a reasonable radius of distance and cost, so I sat in the Ethiopian Airlines office until 6 pm when they were certain that the last person was not going to reconfirm the flight back to Addis the next day, and then they put me on it. Especially convenient was the fact that they somehow managed to work my flights so that I got $75 of a refund back.

We flew a Fokker 50 two-prop from Lalibela back to Addis. By "we," I mean about 30 Polish tourists, an older Italian dentist coming back from making pretty smiles for kids in Tanzania, a few Ethiopians, and me. I learned the following: 1. Polish women apparently do not believe in hair colors that exist in nature. 2. People who haven't flown much in Africa are freaked out by prop planes and African turbulence, which is oddly more swoopy than the bumpy turbulence further north. In the bus from the plane to the airport, they were repeating loudly in deliberate English, "All. Is. Well. That. Ends. Well." The Fokker 50 happens to be the same plane that the UN flies from Juba to The-Town-Formerly-Known-On

-this-Blog-as-Central-Location, aka Rumbek, in Southern Sudan, so I've seen it buffetted around a bit before. Plus one of my colleagues when I worked in Rwanda was the son of a pilot and told me about how much tougher the prop planes are than jets.

The best part of Lalibela was not the churches, although they are pretty amazing. The best part was the climb up above the cliff churches. My guide asked me if I wanted to climb the rocky outcropping up above, and I looked at it for a while and thought about my already-tired legs, and then said yes. I am one of those stubborn people. We hiked up the side for a while and then we started scrambling up the rock face. "Be careful." my guide kept saying, "Do not be afraid." I was not the one who was afraid. (He later admitted to not liking heights and having only gone up the outcropping three times, during guide training, because most people don't bother with the extra climbing.) Finally I popped up through a hole in the rock and I was on the top, looking out over what seemed to be all of Ethiopia. We sat on the top, looking out. I looked and thought, and the guide looked and called people on his mobile phone, which apparently has better network coverage than anywhere below. I wondered why everyone doesn't choose Ethiopia for their vacations.

Marketing

i am practically giddy with the excitement of having the ability to post things. the biggest leap, actually, was the need to type these things in gmail. a whole different screen? very unnerving.

right now, i shall have to type without capitals, because the shift and letter keys on this keyboard do not function in coordination with one another. sometimes you can get a capital, say, g, by pressing down the wrong shift key and slamming the g key many times, but just as often you cannot. so i am going the easy, capital-less route.

ethiopia is famous for its handwoven white cloth with colored ends. well. famous. famous-ish. i had a vague idea that they existed, largely because i went to an ethiopian orthodox church once in nairobi and also because when i was in college/university there was one ethiopian restaurant in town and they had some in the corner for sale. i always wanted one. now that i'm here, it is clear that they are not just tourist items. every woman wears them, and both women and men wear a heavier version at night, to stay warm. i am infatuated with them. i have mentioned before my obsession with textiles. now that i am here and surrounded by them, i cannot keep myself from buying ridiculous quantities. or, after i have purchased ridiculous quantities, from walking around oogling the colored weaving on the ends of other women's shawls. ooh! a black and gold one! oooh! a red and yellow one! ooooh! blue with silver! (never mind that i already have a blue with silver. and a blue with gold.)

so i went to the market today in search of more. because i only have two so far! that's not enough, at all. it's a ways out of town and the number of faranji (whiteys) drops dramatically. not that, comparatively, there are really that many faranjis here. one little kid followed me and told me where to go, and then an older one came to translate. we haggled and discussed, and i ended up with two double-wide shawls, the single widths sewn together by a woman bent over a treadle machine like i learned on as a kid in liberia.

on the way back, the littler kid asked for money. for books, he said. i am very reluctant to give money, ever, to anyone, without a reason. i will sit down and eat with someone, but i don't want to give money. usually, my strategy in any city is simply to look beggars in the eye and smile and say hello (hey, they are people, too), but not to give money. this kid, though, had actually been helpful. i was going to give him money anyway. so i stopped, and explained through the older kid that faranji really dislike being asked for money, but i was grateful for his help and he didn't need to ask, i was going to give him something as a thank you.

the older kid walked me back to my hotel, asking me about w. bush, as he called him, and whether the americans might change their government. I might have, um, accidentally, claimed to be canadian (i've been throwing the two nationalities out at random for some unknown reason. it's the first time and country in which i've ever bothered, but it's sort of addicting to claim to be canadian, oddly), so i had to answer his questions in the third person.

when we arrived at the hotel, i dug into my bag for some change.

no, no. he said, and shook my hand, then leaned in to nudge my shoulder with his the way friends greet one another in east africa. no money. next time you are here, look for me.

(my quotation marks don't work either, by the way.)

i'm probably not going to recognize this kid all grown up, the next time i make it to ethiopia, but it was very sweet.

14 March 2008

I know that you were all waiting with bated breath (baited? where does this phrase come from, anyway?) for posting all about Ethiopia, but it turns out to be nigh unto impossible to post from here. I'm writing this in email and sending it to someone to post from the US.

Ethiopia is not what I expected. I knew it wasn't all brown dirt like the stereotypical starving child photo from the 1980s. I expected Uganda, I think. Green hills and lots of English. I should have read the guidebook before I got here, because Ethiopia 1. does not speak English (it's Amharig, mostly), 2. has many many different kinds of landscape, and 3. has serious history. I've been going to castles and churches like you would in Europe, only better, because this is Africa and in between castles and churches, there are adventures.

A guidebook is your best friend in a place like this, but it limits you to well-trodden trails and keeps you solidly with the other tourists. The best moments, I think, are when you leave the crowds behind and get stuck somewhere obscure. I don't even mean a town. I mean a hillside far from even the smallest semblance of a town, like the hillside I sat on yesterday, with little kids swarming and offering me "injera? milk? water? fish?" One of them screamed and hid behind her sister every time I so much as glanced in her direction. After a while, when we got bored with taking photos on the digital camera and looking at them, I took the guidebook out and showed them the pictures. One older one, who spoke some English ("Are you in school? Do you learn English in school?" I asked. "No," he said, "no school. The teachers do not come."), tried to read the book, and we looked together at pictures of all the famous sites in Ethiopia. "Debre Birihan Selassie!" they shouted excitedly when the page turned to the painted ceiling of the church in Gonder. "Lake Tana!" at the photo of a man fishing in the lake. They were remarkably well-informed kids. Would American eight-year old recognize a church by its paintings, even one in the nearest large town?

The men were loading wood on the truck that brought me, the first of four rides that, patched together, would finally bring me back to Gonder after three and a half hours (the guidebook claimed it was one hour in a bus and two hours in a slow, constantly stopping minibus. Ha.) They had tattoos of a square cross on their foreheads. The little kids wore necklaces with crosses and keys and circles of metal. "What is this?" I asked the boy who spoke English. "For the church," he said. When we set off, we left behind the man who had shown us the way, who sat sideways to stare at the white girl the entire ride (awkward, very awkward). Instead, an old woman sat next to me, smiling and speaking to me in Amharig. I smiled and answered in English and I don't think either of us cared that the details weren't clear.

Today I had planned to see another castle, south on the road to Bahir Dar. But then the prospect of sleeping in won out against the prospect of at least as much driving as yesterday (6 hours - the intended castle was further but on better roads than yesterday) and instead I woke up late and hiked up the hill to Empress Mentewab's palace and church right near town. In a shady compound on the hill, surrounded by tall pine trees and stone walls, I decided that is where I want to live. Right there, on the hill, in the walls. I'm going to set up a little living room in the shade and never go inside again, unless it rains. I can see why an Empress would choose that location. I climbed up the steep stairs to her bedroom (no floor now) and tried to imagine living there.

Empress Mentewab's bones are in a glass-topped casket in the basement of the church, with the bones of her son and grandson. At first it seemed disrespectful to display them like that, but I began to think, after looking at her castle, that maybe she's happy to stay right there in her beautiful mountaintop compound. I wouldn't want to leave, either.

Now I am extremely dehydrated from hiking in the sun. Not remembering water before beginning a hike up a mountain was not my brightest moment, and the shop on the way up the hill was out. It only had Pepsi. I came back to town and drank two pineapple juices with lemon in a row (brilliant drink, just brilliant), but I don't think they have yet rehydrated me, if my body's screaming for water is any indication.

(P.S. If I did manage to post something yesterday - I tried - then this overlaps a bit. Ignore that!)

two completely unrelated topics

I've lived about 12.5 years of my life in Michigan. (Compare to Africa: about 13 years.) So I'm not exactly new to this place. I do not seem to have learned much in 12.5 years here, though. Yesterday, for example, I went for a nice bike ride. In 35 degree weather. With bad gloves. And no hat.

By the time I came back inside, there were shooting pains through my ears into my head. I paced around for five minutes, waving my hands over my ears, unable to sit or think for the pain. I can still feel the reverberations of it today.

Smart, very smart. Twelve.5 years of utterly wasted experience.

...

After writing about how Ethiopia is a VACATION ONLY, I started thinking about the concept. Here in Michigan, it's mostly going to a lake to swim/fish/boat or driving somewhere new. Sometimes even a flight to a beach somewhere. And it's weird to think that for me, going to Ethiopia is approximately equivalent to that. Not exactly, because I can go to a cottage on a lake in Michigan, too, but it isn't so far away that I can't fathom it. Clearly I can, because I'm going.

I was talking to a friend the other day about this phrase that people have said to me several times since I first moved to Rwanda. It goes like this, "It's so wonderful that you've made that sacrifice to go and help those poor people in Africa." If you have said this to someone before, don't feel bad (although please don't use the words "those people," ever, because people are people and that phrase is so divisive and belittling), it's just that... I love being in Africa. It's not a sacrifice. I am just living where I love to live. And I'm not doing much, if anything. I'm doing exactly what I do here in the US: working and living and doing the best I can. I don't think I can "save" Africa, and I'm not even sure what such "saving" would look like and it wouldn't come from some white girl from Michigan. All I know is that, in many ways, going to Africa is as much of a homecoming for me as landing in Michigan, except that there's no family waiting to meet me. I don't need a reason to go. The bigger problem is that I can't stay away.

So, I crossed the country. 2/3 of it, anyway. I'm in Michigan. I spent my time in the airport in Gone West cackling joyously over the tiny little two-seater planes taking off. So tiny! So cute! Like you could pick them up and hold them in the palm of your hand! I have a not-really-hidden desire to learn how to fly a plane. The only thing (other than paying off the loans) that tempts me toward working at a law firm for the $$$ is the idea that I could afford to take pilot lessons. Except then I figured out that I would probably have to spend my weekends in the office and would have no time for pilot lessons, so I decided I could conserve in other ways and still do the lessons on a lower-paying job. I have priorities. Travel and learning to fly a plane are high on them.

Then again, about traveling. Let's discuss.

Flying with a US-based airline: worst airline experience ever. I'm torn between "Americans suck at customer service" and "This airline must treat their employees really terribly for them to hate the customers so much." I guess it's probably a combination. You can see the hatred in the eyes of the flight attendants when someone asks for something, and I am of the opinion that one does not get that level of hatred, even for annoying customers who dare to ask politely for water, of all things, unless you are being belittled and underpaid by your employer. (Yes, Northwest Airlines, I am talking about you.) Also, remember those packages of pretzels that probably cost $0.001 each? Yeah, those are gone. In their place is a package of disgusting snacks that you have to pay $5.00 to buy (well, I don't buy them, but one could), and which probably cost the airline 14 cents to put together. It's a total racket. If I had a choice (which I don't, really, given the Michigan factor), I would never set foot in a NWA plane again. (Then again, I've already sworn off ATA and American - worst bathrooms I've ever seen - and I do have to FLY sometimes, so...)

Anyway, I made it to Michigan. Now I just have to pull myself together for the trip to Ethiopia. I don't bother to do much reading ahead anymore about where I'm going, because I assume it will be fine, but I did happen to notice something about roasted corn sold on the side of the road, which made me (virtually) twirl about with glee. Other than the part where the corn sticks in your teeth, there is almost nothing I like better than slightly burned roasted corn on the side of the road in East Africa. It's not sweet, you see. I don't really like sweet corn. But this corn is nuttier-tasting. Still not excited, really, because there are two overnight flights and a trans-London bus ride between me and the ground in Ethiopia, but the corn is something to anticipate.

Oh, one more thing: my mom told me that people keep asking what I'm doing, expecting a good story, and she says, "Oh, she just took the bar, and now she's going on vacation to Ethiopia." And the other party asks, "Oh, but what's she doing there?"

"Just visiting. Vacationing."

"But... who is she working for?"

"NO ONE. She's going for VACATION."

Apparently the concept of going to Africa just for fun does not exist in Michigan.

"Well," my dad said, "You could just tell them she'll save a few souls on the side, while she's touring the country."

Then we all fell over laughing.

ah-hem

You know you haven't quite reintegrated to your current country when you start fretting about a friend's safety when she goes on vacation and you call on the day she's supposed to come back to find out how it was and to say hi because the bar exam is over! What else is there to do? And she's not back within cell range by 7 p.m. "But, it's dark." you think, "How will she make it back tonight?" After a few hours, you suddenly remember that people drive in the dark here. Even long distances. How novel!