Journal 2 – October 27, 1998

I hope that future get-togethers with these guys aren’t so heavily alcoholic. For one thing, I don’t like drinking that much, and I certainly don’t like being hungover the next day. I didn’t try and stop them from buying me so much beer this time because it was our first time there, and it was kind of a special occasion. But next time we get together and in the future I’m going to control my own alcoholic intake.

Derege’s kind of interesting. Perfectly sober, sometimes his conversation is difficult to follow. He has a habit of missing the point that he’s trying to make. He just leaves it implied and tells you the story. All the details surrounding it are so disjointed I can’t connect them with what he’s trying to say. It’s like I miss the theme or topic of a speech, and when they go into details, I have no idea what they’re talking about. And the more he drinks, the more pronounced this becomes until… and the details he looks for in the story turn into just conversation, what this person said, what he said without any context whatsoever and finally he gets reduced to reliving the hand gestures and facial expressions in the story he’s telling, and I have no idea what he’s talking about. And I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one. At one point I’d been listening to Derege talk for five minutes on something I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and Gitahun came back into the conversation and he stopped and asked him exactly what are you talking about? And then Derege gave the theme of his story and ah, suddenly it all came clear.

The owner of the restaurant was well-known to these men, and she came over and joined us. She was an interesting-looking woman who had taken her hair and somehow straightened it, made it a little bit longer western style and had dyed it kind of brown. She was very friendly though she looked absolutely exhausted and as the evening went on, it wasn’t very late – only ten o’clock or so – but the entire restaurant was empty, the bar was empty and they obviously wanted to go home, eventually got to the point where the waitress who had been working behind the bar pulled out a mattress and dragged this mattress into the restaurant and laid it down on the ground and started making up her bed. If that isn’t a hint that it’s time to leave, it’s closing time, I don’t know what is.

The owner had relatives in Canada. In fact I’d be hard pressed to think of a single person here that I’ve met who hasn’t mentioned a relative living in Canada. And when I say that I’ve never actually spoken to an Ethiopian living in Canada everyone is quite amazed. And now that I realize how many Ethiopians there are in Canada I too am amazed that I never actually encountered any of them. It sounds like it’s a huge community.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this restaurant for me was the number of cats that were everywhere. There must have been seven of them and they had the complete run of the restaurant. Going in and out of our legs under the tables, rushing outside, inside. They basically went wherever they wanted to.

Everyone gave me a lot more credit for knowledge about Ethiopia, the Amharic language and Ethiopian culture than I really deserve. This is something that always astonishes me. Here are five very educated men who speak English fluently, who know everything there is to know about the west. They know more about Canada than most Canadians do, certainly more than most Americans do and then I … at one point when I was introduced to the owner of the restaurant I raised myself off the chair slightly, shook her hand and bowed, keeping my left hand across my chest which I’ve learned is the Ethiopian style, also the Korean style so it comes to me very naturally because I did it for so long in Korea. They saw me do this and showered me with compliments on my knowledge of Ethiopian customs. When I come up with one or two words in Amharic, even a simple greeting they are amazed and tell me how wonderful that is. And something else that surprises me is how favourably they compare me with all the other foreigners they’ve met. Every time I do something like this, the fact that I eat Ethiopian food, that I’ve gone out to a bar, that I know one or two words in Amharic, all these things they really admire and they say that it’s very unusual for foreigners to do this kind of thing. I just can’t imagine what kind of foreigners they’ve been meeting. And I can’t imagine how they think I could live any differently. Eating Ethiopian food only makes sense because that’s all there is. How in the world could I live here and not eat Ethiopian food? I suppose if I lived in the Hilton Hotel and ate every single meal in their restaurant off the western menu you could do it that way but otherwise it’s eat Ethiopian or starve. And Ethiopian food is not a hardship anyway. The incredible amount of meat takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s very simple to eat and if I watch how I eat and don’t drink with it, I shouldn’t have too many problems digesting it either.

When a person leaves a table for any length of time and for any reason, including just going to the bathroom, when they come back everyone greets them with the Amharic word “norr”. I don’t know exactly what it means. It could mean “welcome back”. And everyone rises off their seat a little bit and the proper response is ‘thanks be to God’. I don’t know what that is in Amharic yet, I can’t remember it. Eventually we were thrown out of the restaurant. The owner came out with us. She got into a taxi and left, and then the bunch of us got ourselves a taxi. The bill in the restaurant came to close to a hundred birr, which is a lot of money, and we had some food at the end as well in addition to the beer and talla, and Derege and Gitahun split it between them. I saw no way of getting in there myself which is what I wanted to do. I was kind of hoping the evening was over because both Gitahun and Derege were drunk to the point that their conversation was getting a little bit one-sided. It wasn’t a conversation anymore – diatribes. And I spent all my time looking at them, listening, and they weren’t making a lot of sense anymore. But it seems the evening wasn’t over. They were going to escort me all the way back to the Tiru Gondar, which I appreciated because otherwise I wouldn’t know how to find my way back, but once there we all piled into the nearby Reggae Bar, which is the local loud competition for the dancing at the Palm Hotel. I was in no shape for a new place. But we went in, sat down. I was introduced to the owner again. I’m sure everyone in there knew who I was already. It’s not like you can live in the supermarket area, be a faranji on a bicycle and be incognito. But I only got a few glances when I went in, and then people stopped looking my way. The beer started to come and I tried to keep up but I’d really had enough by that point. The music was extremely loud, so I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying anyway. There were very few women in the bar, almost strictly men, and there was a lot of dancing going on. They played mostly American music. There was some BeeGees believe it or not. They played one of their Saturday Night Fever tunes, which everyone danced to madly. It was mainly men standing around and they would dance with each other. It was almost like a competition. Almost as if you moved all the tables and chairs out of the way they would have formed themselves in a circle, everyone sort of dancing on the edges and then one by one they would take centre stage and show their moves as it were, and at the risk of being cliched or whatever, the dancing was amazing, very graceful. None of the awkwardness you would see with a bunch of white men dancing.

The conversation at that point was so difficult to follow and so tiresome that I really wanted to get up and dance myself, and I was drunk enough that given the slightest opening I would have been up there dancing with the best of them. But that didn’t happen and eventually Derege took things in hand and bundled us outside. Gitahun did not want the evening to end, and it took a lot of persuasion to get him to admit that the evening was over. The rest is history as they say. I stumbled to my bed, lay down and slept fairly well. I made sure every time I woke up to take another long drink of water, as much water as I could possibly consume knowing that that would fend off any headaches the next day. And I also took a couple of codeine when I felt the headache coming on early in the morning.

Sundays are pretty relaxed here. I don’t know if anyone goes to church or anything like that, but the music is kept at a low volume and everyone gets up a little bit later. So all in all it’s a good day.

Sunday October 25, 1998 4:25 p.m.

Just after my bike ride in the city. I wrote about it in my paper journal at length, so I don’t need to talk about it here. I’m back in the safety of the Tiru Gondar, relative safety I suppose cause whenever I arrive now I have to run a gauntlet of people to get down the hall and get into my room. Everyone wants to help carry the bike, but every time they try they don’t know how to pick it up properly, they don’t realize that the weight is off-centred because I have a heavy bag on one side. It continually slips out of their hands and looks like it’s going to crack up. Tadale insisted on helping to bring it into the room, and of course he did it all wrong. He ended up smashing the mirror against the doorway. Luckily it didn’t break, so no harm done. But I foresee a day when their patience will be at an end and they’ll want to take the bike out for a ride around the city and I really don’t think I can let them do that. It’s too much of a risk. If they make a mistake and crash and break something, they’ll feel terrible, and I’ll be in a worse position because spare parts for this bike don’t exist here beyond the parts that I brought with me. So for everyone’s best interest I can’t really declare open season on my bike the way I did with the camera.

This morning when Agere brought me my breakfast and she told me what it was called, I made a couple of half-hearted attempts to find out what it was before it was delivered to me. Once it was delivered, the look of it and the texture of it convinced me that I didn’t really want to know what it was, and I got through breakfast okay as long as I didn’t think too much about what I was eating. After breakfast when I felt better, I was talking to Zebachew outside and I showed him the word I’d written down and I asked him what it was and my suspicions actually were correct. It wasn’t liver but lamb kidneys. I don’t know how big a lamb kidney is, but it can’t be that big. Judging by the number of pieces in that bowl that I ate I can’t imagine how many lambs had to die to put together that much lamb kidney.

There seems to be a movement afoot by Zebachew and Tadele, and perhaps Sisay is in on it as well, to get me out to an Azmari Bet tonight. Every time Zabachew mentions it, just to make sure I know what he’s talking about he does that little dance move, the traditional Ethiopian culture he calls it.

I think Abiy is going to drop by tonight as well. It seems they come here pretty much every night to have a cup of coffee in the supermarket area. So we’ll see what happens. At this point I sure could use his company, a nice conversation. I’ll probably end up telling him about my day and listing the sheer number of objects that were thrown at me and the number of physical attacks I went through on my two hour ride, but I probably shouldn’t because he and Derege are so nice they’re going to feel awful even if I try and tell them about it as a joke or present it as something I want to figure out that doesn’t really bother me that much. They’ll both feel terrible about it, and it isn’t really their fault. That side of Ethiopia has nothing whatever to do with them. They would never do that kind of thing and they can’t be held responsible for it.

I left the Alem Bunna before I finished writing in my paper journal because it was getting very crowded, and I felt like I’d occupied my table too long already. Every time when I show up in that place, I create all this confusion because I take over a table, and I stay longer than normal and the atmosphere is pretty casual. People don’t expect to have a table to themselves and if you sit down at a table with three chairs and there’s two empty chairs people can come in and sit in those chairs no problem, that’s the custom there. But of course when I’m sitting there, there’s this little bit of hesitancy about doing that, and I have to keep an eye on all the people coming in and out, and if I see two people eyeing my chairs, I make eye contact and indicate that it’s fine with me if they sit down. I do that for a while but then eventually I feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome, and it’s time to go. So I left. But the last couple of thoughts that I wanted to get down had to do with the fact that this little trip around Addis today was a bit of a sobering experience, and that might not be such a bad thing. Let’s say the worst came to worst in that market alleyway where things got a bit ugly. They could have stolen the bike of course. They would have gotten the bag, which had essentially everything in. All of my camera gear, my journal, my maps, books, this recorder, binoculars, everything was in my survival kit, my walkman. But more than that I also have my little Sun Dog money pouch with me at all times, and it has everything in it that I own, all of my cash, all of my traveller’s cheques, vaccination booklet and passport and I like having that with me because I know where it is at all times, and being with me is the one place where I can be sure it’s safe. But at the same time there’s a risk. Maybe I should think about leaving that chunk of traveller’s checks that I have from Korea still behind.

It occurs to me as well that this little trip I took around Addis today is probably something that Ethiopians themselves would feel nervous about doing. They feel very comfortable in their neighborhood, in their village, and like last night when we went downtown, Derege himself felt threatened by the possibility of thieves around him, things like that. So I shouldn’t be so terribly surprised that I run into trouble doing things that are probably quite unwise. I have this sense of invulnerability and I can go anywhere and there won’t be any problems, but that probably isn’t true and I should be a little bit more careful. Not paranoid but err on the side of caution a little more. I’ve seen a number of people on the streets here in Addis that definitely were not right in the head, and they’re big and strong and healthy, and one of them could cause a bit of trouble and it wouldn’t be their fault because they’re not exactly stable. Something to think about.

 

Around the Piazza, I stopped my bicycle in front of a building, more because I needed a break from the chaos of the roads. It was sort of an open gravel area, not really a parking lot, but it looked sort of like a parking lot, and I looked around, and in front of me was a quite large building. It was a government building and had a sign that read “Information and Culture Ministry”. There was a glass display out front with a lot of posters and photographs of government ministers accepting plaques and dinners and whatever else it is that government ministers do. There were also a number of editorial style cartoons. I couldn’t understand what any of them meant, but I suspect they were to do with Eritrea. I suspect this because there was one large full-color poster that had an English title and the pictures were of Ethiopian civilians from a town called Mengele or Menelik or something like that. It’s a border town with Eritrea and all these civilians were victims of an air strike and they were very gruesome pictures. Lots of dismembered limbs and bloody wounds with blood soaked rags and children lying in blood soaked blankets. It struck me as very strange because this was obviously a government publication that somebody put together to deliberately inflame public sentiment against the Eritreans. On the one hand you think of a war as something that everyone would do their best to avoid. Who wants a war? What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, as the song goes. But here they’re fanning the flames of anger as if they want the war. I don’t know exactly what the status is in the border area right now. I know that there’s a conference beginning soon somewhere in Africa in an attempt to prevent the war through diplomatic means, which tells me that the war isn’t actually on. There are hostilities, but there’s no actual fighting. But then I read several other articles which indicate that a state of war exists and that there is fighting. Then I read some other articles which indicate that they aren’t fighting right now, but as soon as the ground gets a bit drier and they can move their artillery pieces around, they’re going to resume fighting. As if the he war is going to happen and it has a date and a time and everyone is expecting it to happen.

I also saw another wedding procession today. I think I’ve seen a wedding procession every day since my arrival, and the people getting married either took every penny they could possibly scrounge to rent a whole bunch of cars, or a lot of rich people with a lot of expensive cars are suddenly getting married.

In keeping with Lonely Planeteer culture, I still have to get myself to a wedding. I’ve already been invited to one, but this wedding isn’t until next Saturday and the invitation came from Dawit, so we can pretty much write that off right now. It’s not going to happen. The wedding will happen, but I will not count on going to this thing even if I am here on Saturday. I saw Dawit yesterday outside of the gambling room where they’re playing gin rummy, the gin rummy room, and this was the day after he stood me up again and it was a special stood me up situation because we literally shook hands several times and he said very clearly, “OK, this is for real, we are going to do this.” He realized that he changed plans on me several times before, but he said no, this time it is definite, this is an invitation, I will be here at three o’clock and we will go. And then of course he never showed up. I’m not really that worried about it because I don’t like his company that much anyway, so it’s no skin off my nose. But I was curious how he would react on seeing me, and there was no reaction at all. He said nothing at all. I only brought it up obliquely by saying oh, we missed each other again yesterday, and he says oh yeah I went with some other friends and that was it. So I don’t think I’ll be heading over to the Palm Hotel and trying to drop in on Dawit anymore.

7:23 pm

I was hoping that Abiy would drop by and around five or six, so I went outside and to the billiardo room hoping to find him there and there he was. Again, there is a little bit of a mystery in our relationship. I don’t understand why he would go into the billiardo room and just wait for me to show up rather than walk through the hotel and knock on my door.

We stood and talked there for a while, and I suggested we go get a cup of coffee and I was assuming we would go down to the Alem Bunna because that’s where we’ve always gone and the first time I met them that’s where we went but there was a hesitancy in his manner this time and we ended up instead at another coffee shop (Jockey Bar – pronounced ‘jokey’) just around the corner from the Tiru Gondar in the opposite direction. What was odd about the whole thing ultimately was that after we sat down and were there for a while, Derege showed up and I’m assuming that the two of them had concocted this plan between them to meet at this particular coffee shop. So what I don’t understand is why Abiy wouldn’t just say that. It seems the most natural thing in the world from my point of view where you talk about your plans and come up with some kind of an idea of what you’re doing. If he was a Canadian he’d say, “Hi Douglas. Do you want to go get a coffee at this place? Derege going’s to meet us there around six thirty.” Why he didn’t do that I don’t know. This coffee shop is quite nice. It’s a lot bigger than the Alem Bunna and has a lot more tables and has a higher ceiling and there’s a lot more room between tables so it might be a good place for me to go to do some morning journal writing. I think I could occupy a table there for a longer period of time without disrupting things quite as much.

I ordered a makiato, which is my favorite. According to something I just read, a makiato is described as an espresso with milk but more coffee than the norm so it’s one of the stronger coffees that you can order here. The one that they gave me is not nearly as good as the one at the Alem Bunna but it was still pretty good. They covered it with chocolate on top and they added sugar before they gave it to me so I didn’t have any choice about that. At the Alem Bunna you add your own sugar, and I don’t because this coffee is so rich it really doesn’t need any sugar to help it along.

Abiy told me that Derege and Gitahun continued the drinking binge until daylight. They were out there till six or seven in the morning and then they had breakfast and I assume slept the day away. Part of the reason is that Gitahun, whenever they go out drinking never wants to go home. The other reason being that when they did get to his home the door was locked and he had to wake someone up to let them in but no one answered the door. So they knocked on the door and banged on the door for ten minutes but nobody came so there was nothing for them to do but go out drinking again which is what they did.

When Derege came in, you could tell that he’d had a pretty rough night. He didn’t have his usual energy, and he sat down at our table and pretty much just sat there looking off in the distance and keeping to himself. Abiy was being no help with the conversation. He has an odd sort of manner about him. Very friendly of course and very open but not very energetic. So you get the feeling that he doesn’t really want to be there, but he obviously really does, and he’ll tell you he does and yet we ended up with these long awkward silences that I wasn’t sure what they were doing there. I ended up talking a lot. I figured maybe they wanted me to tell stories about different things. So whatever the topic was that we touched on earlier, I’d pick up the thread of it and tell some story about my previous life. I told them about Boracay and the Philippines and how we’d watch the sunset on one side of the island and then stay up all night and watch the sunrise on the other side. Things like that, and then the story would sort of trail off and it was obvious that nobody was very interested in the story, so I might as well just keep quiet.

Someone that Abiy knew died recently, and he spent the day at a funeral 130 kilometres away, and he had to go there by public bus and then the funeral itself and then 130 kilometres back again. I suppose that’s a topic where he could have talked and told me something about his day, what happened, but he’s not much of a talker it seems.

In one of the lulls in the conversation, I couldn’t help myself, I tried to make it light and humorous, but I mentioned my bike ride today and in a funny way I listed all the things that had happened to me from being hit with a banana peel to two rocks to the guy kicking the bike and trying to knock me over. It fell flat as I knew it would, and as soon as I told the story I wished I hadn’t because no matter how lightly I tell it, it inevitably ends up sounding like I’m blaming them for this kind of behavior, or I want them to make it better, to give me recompense or by telling the story to them I’m somehow getting revenge on these people who hit me with stones who I couldn’t track down.

We talked about my upcoming trip to the north, which I seem to be delaying day after day and the delays are really quite understandable considering how difficult riding my bike in Addis has been, the attitude of people to me on the bike plus the stories I hear from Ethiopians themselves who seem much more frightened of their own people than I am. Whenever the subject of my bicycle comes up, they immediately raise a whole host of problems, and it’s ironic that here I am a complete stranger to this country, and I’m quite willing to barrel on ahead regardless of these dangers and with the willingness to deal with the problems as they come up. Abiy wondered if I could do 100 kilometres or more on my bike in a day, because as far as he was concerned there was no place to stay between here and I guess Fiche, which is 110-120 kilometres away. But of course I plan on staying in small towns inbetween. I can always find someplace to stay, but for him he certainly wouldn’t be willing to do it. It’s his country, so to put himself voluntarily in an uncomfortable place, why would he do that? It wouldn’t be an adventure for him, and he sees me as a prosperous westerner regardless of how adventurous my trip might seem. He can’t quite see me wanting to stay in these small villages in between the big towns.

Derege had some more dire warnings for me about shifta. They both said make sure I’m done my travelling by four o’clock in the afternoon, do not travel after that time. Derege suggested convoying with any bus or truck that comes around. He seemed quite adamant that this was a good idea, I really should do it, but of course I pointed out to him that there’s no way I could keep up with a motorized vehicle on these roads. I’m going to be on my own regardless, and I’ll just have to take my chances with the shifta.

Abiy though did have some very good advice, and I think I’m going to follow up on it. He suggested that I figure out how much money I’m going to need on this trip, go to a bank here in Addis Ababa and have that money wired ahead to cities along my route. My gut reaction is “no way”. That makes everything so complicated. I’d prefer to keep everything with me, keep everything under my control without having to rely on other people. But I have to pay attention to what people here are telling me. They do know their own country, and I’ve heard about shiftas so many times that they must exist in some form or another so there is a risk of robbery. And if that’s the case, and if it’s easy as he says to send this money ahead I would be pretty foolish not to take advantage of that and not to do that. I only have to imagine a worst case scenario to see that his advice makes good sense. I currently have everything that I own in the pouch on my belt and imagine if I’m halted by some shifta on a lonely stretch of road and they take everything, take my bike, all of my gear and everything that I have on me. That would be a pretty bad situation to be five hundred miles from Addis Ababa with no passport, no cash, no traveller’s cheques, nothing at all. So ideally what I should do is change enough money to get me from here to Gondar. I was supposed to have that money already but I went on a spending spree with all this picture taking and this Talkbook Sanyo I’m using right now. So I need to get some more money, figure out how much I need to get me to Gondar, change that. Send to Gondar enough money to get me from there to Axum, send money to Axum and perhaps even to Lalibela and I should also squirrel away some emergency cash perhaps on the bicycle itself. There are plenty of tubes and hiding spots I can use on the bike and perhaps in a money belt around my waist though I don’t really want to spend the next two months with a money belt on.

It’s almost nine o’clock at night and if Zebachew comes through in about an hour’s time, we’re going to be heading out into the city looking for an Asmari Bet. I’m not sure how I feel about that because it’s a dancing place and I imagine I’ll be expected to get up and do the African dancing with them. They’ve got Amharic music playing right now next door at the restaurant. You can hear it probably. Interesting enough I suppose, but it does get to be a bit monotonous when each song follows the other on and on and on for hours. Today was probably the first day of sunshine that we’ve had, and I could feel the sun on my neck and it was really quite hot and it seems to have also brought out some of the local wildlife. In the bathroom, I just noticed that on the ceiling was a moth about the size of a small bird.

Later;

Tonight I had my first experience of an Ethiopian asmari bet which is kind of a traditional Ethiopian dance and music hall. Zabachew, the manager at the Tiru Gondar, he invited me to go. Well, I found out that the Addis Ababa Herald is in fact the government newspaper and I could have figured that out because reading it is pretty boring. It didn’t have much of interest. Today I bought an Addis Tribune, a Tambek International Publication. It calls itself Ethiopia’s first private English language newspaper at a price of one birr fifty cents.

(I read stuff from the newspaper but since I brought that same newspaper home with me there isn’t much point in transcribing it.)

In an odd sort of footnote, Sisay and I just came back from a hairdressers. My hair was quite long and out of control so I thought I wanted to get it cut. Sisay kindly took me in hand and we walked down to the Supermarket. I learned along the way that this whole area that encompasses the Supermarket is actually called Kasanches. He says that’s an Italian word, but I don’t know what it means if it is Italian. Kasanches. I made a joke like it sounded like someone sneezing, but he didn’t find that very funny.

We walked for quite a while. We went past the Alem Bunna coffee shop, pretty much outside the area where I’ve gone on foot, so far anyway. We went past a bus station and we came to the hairdressers. It was a very modern looking place and they did an incredible job on my hair. The woman sat me down. There was an Ethiopian man waiting, quite a bit older than I am. He was there before me, but he indicated that I should go first, which was very nice. I was curious whether cutting a ferengi’s hair would cause any trouble but no, she sat me down… she tended to cut it in a way… like she combed it backwards a lot, got it wet, combed it upwards so that it stuck out from my head, I suppose similar to an afro, and then she started cutting it from there. But she kept cutting and cutting and cutting and she ended up with a very nice cut. She did ask me if I wanted it short or medium, and I’m very glad I said medium because if this is medium I would hate to see what short looks like. Everyone here seems to like the cut and actually, looking in the mirror it looks a lot better than how it looked when I arrived.

The interesting note was that she had some pictures on her mirror of her cutting someone’s hair and I assumed it was some kind of famous person, and I found out at the end it was actually a picture of this marathon runner Haile Gebre Selassie, the subject of this film endurance. The name of my hairdresser was Mulu. It was a very nice experience. She took maybe forty minutes to cut my hair. Lots of personal attention and Sisay said that she was very fast. I feel like going back for another haircut just so I can get my head massaged like that again. A couple of unique touches. Before she cut my hair she put cotton batten plugs in my ears so that hair wouldn’t fall down into my ears. And part way through the cut, someone brought out a bowl of hot water, kind of a scented hot water, and she soaked a face cloth in that and then rubbed my whole head with that.

(describe the column “Ferengi in Addis Ababa”)

That obviously could be right out of my journal describing my day when I was hit, in a single day, with one banana, three stones, a stick, a kick plus a good solid punch or grab or whatever it was, and of course I did not keep my cool. Well, I suppose I shouldn’t say that, because I cycled through hours of taunts and insults and profanity and everything like that and I never lost my cool. I managed to ignore that quite comfortably. It was only being hit by rocks when I lost it.

But in this same article, he goes on to describe an incident where a foreigner behaved very badly. This was at the airport… (more description and reading from the column)

Personally I find this next section the most interesting part, at least the part that would effect me most. He says, “It is a testament to Ethiopian civility that the incident did not get violent for Olaf…”

I don’t know if it comes across just from those portions, but when you read the whole column you get a very weird tone. At the beginning, he does describe this incredible harassment of the Asian men and how they treated it well. That’s fine and dandy. But this end bit shows definitely where his sympathies lie, and he does say he doesn’t condone the violence but in fact he is condoning it. His attitude was the Frenchman got what he deserved. His mild handling of the idea that passersby joined in to beat the crap out of this Frenchman tells me that he probably didn’t mind this happening. Of course it makes me think of that time in the market where I was attacked, and I turned on them as well. I was very insulting and very loud. I called them animals, assuming of course that no one could understand me but they probably did. So who knows how close I came to getting the crap beat out of me? We’ll see.

There’s a surprising number of job postings in the paper and each one is quite large. They’re quarter page ads and I suppose not unexpectedly they are all connected with NGO’s of some variety or other. I’m really finding it quite astonishing the level of NGO activity here. Walking down the street to the hairdressers I noticed a bunch of garbage trucks that looked to be in pretty good shape – brand new good-looking trucks. And on the side of them great big signs “Donated by the people of Japan”.

On the back page we have a horoscope. Looking at Airies for the 26th it says… in fact it doesn’t say anything about today. It talks about the 27th, the 28th, the 29th but today is a total blank. I took quite a few more photos of the family today. It was sparked first of all by Tirunesh. She was here. She wasn’t dressed up in her Sunday bes,t so she’s insisting that next time around I go to her house and we’ll take some more pictures out there when she has better clothing on. But then of course with my new haircut Sisay suggested that we have to get another picture of him and I together. Me with my new hair and actually he has a new haircut as well. All the boys in the family got modern, very chic haircuts, shaved bald on the sides leaving a mohawk, very short mohawk along the top. But this time they wanted pictures with me in them. What I’ve done before of course is I set up the picture, focus the camera, set the light, that kind of thing and then ask them, stand here and take the picture. Unfortunately though the concept of focus is lost on them, let alone setting the f-stop. Just forget about that. When we were done taking some of the pictures, Zabachew disappeared with the camera and he ran around chasing people with the camera and they ran inside and he was busy snapping pictures in the hallway and inside the rooms. In fact I’d given Zabachew a kind of a lesson in photography and he nodded and said yes, I understand. I pointed out that you needed a certain amount of light and indoors with this camera there isn’t enough light. He said yes. About focusing he said yes. But when it came right down to it he just snapped away indoors. We’ll have to see what happens when he sees the developed pictures. Well, they probably won’t even print them. On my previous rolls there were a couple that he took as well and he had it set on infinity focus when I was two feet away. I have the negative and I can see how badly out of focus it is. And the people at the store didn’t even bother printing it.

More proof in how good the Ethiopians are in running. I commented before that all these children will run beside my bike and they’ll run with me for a couple of kilometres without tiring. I see here on the sports back page (reading from the newspaper).

(Advertisements from the Addis Tribune)

Another little note about my room here. Most of the locks here in Ethiopia have this interesting system. When you turn the key in your lock, it pushes a bar over and of course the bar locks into place in the door jamb. The difference is that with each turn of the key the bar moves over another half an inch or so. So if you just turn it once you don’t get much of a connection into the door jamb. And the one I have on the main door to the room here, I remember when they let me in and they had to unlock the door it involved something like seven turns of the key in order to pull the steel bar back all the way, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk,… I can’t be bothered with it. I only do it once. But every time they see me only do it once someone comes rushing over, “No, no, you must do more” and they turn it three or four times.

I met another couple of men over lunch today. One of them was originally from Lalibela. It’s his hometown. And he had some advice for me about the north. In particular he said that the road between the main highway and Lalibela has now been rebuilt. It’s a brand new paved road, which is good news because on my map it has one of those thin red lines, which means it’s basically a goat track, which might have been a problem for even my bike. But now the road is good so I can ride all the way to Lalibela. I don’t have to fly. He also mentioned that it was no problem at all seeing the Simien mountains. It was very customary to get a hotel room there, store your luggage, whatever it is, in my case my bicycle, and get a guide and a porter and head off into the mountains for a few days. So that’s good.

 

Tags: Ethiopia Journal on Tape