When Dawit stood me up on the trip to the market, I took the plunge and unleashed the powers of my “Route 66” mountain bike with its Rhino rims, Python tires, Snakebite tubes and 24 speed LX gears on the city. I simply chose a direction and went. The layout of Addis was still a mystery. I find if my first day in a new city I get my bearings then things make sense. But if on that first day I’m lost, like I had been coming in from the airport, I struggle for a long time. In Addis I simply hadn’t been able to pinpoint big landmarks and my position relative to them. I had two city maps, but no matter how much I stared at them I remained confused. But on this second ride around the city I learned quite a bit more.

For one thing I learned what my name was going to be. The people of Addis called me ‘hey you’ or ‘you you,’ often ‘you you you you’. Then they mixed them up in combinations: ‘you hey you you’ or ‘you you hey you.’ A close second was the Amharic word for foreigner, ‘ferenji’ It’s difficult to understand why the simple sight of me would send women into a screaming fit of ‘ferenji.’ They screamed it at me – p. Planted their feet, thrust their face forward and screamed the word like a projectile.

I knew it was hopeless, but I tried to imagine a situation in Canada where I might do the same. I supposed if I was standing at the side of the road in Toronto and suddenly out of nowhere an enormous trumpeting elephant came charging around the corner I might be so startled as to shout ‘elephant’ in my surprise. I might even run around screaming ‘elephant elephant’ if I wanted to tell other people about this miraculous event. But I found it hard to believe that my appearance in Addis was as strange as that. And it’s not a proper comparison. They weren’t shouting out ‘ferenji’ to other Ethiopians. They shouted it at me as if telling me what I was. But that wasn’t it either. There was a psychology at work beyond my comprehension.

The effect, though, was more understandable. It drove me crazy. I knew about this before I went there. Indeed, some variation of this occurs in most countries in the third world. But knowing about it didn’t help me deal with it especially when the attention turned nasty and they hurled ‘motherfucker’ and ‘fuck you’ at me along with some well-placed stones, two of which caught me in the back.

It’s the kind of contradiction that can drive you to despair if you insist on unravelling its mystery. Was I treated well? No question. I was treated very well. Like an emperor. Were the Ethiopians I’d met kind? Their kindness astonished me. Their concern for my welfare knew no limit. I was accorded a thousand times more respect than I deserved. The unstinting kindness, honesty, gentleness and friendliness that I found took me completely by surprise and made me feel the worst type of fraud because I couldn’t possibly give back what they gave me.

But then, two hours out there in the city and the shouts, the yells, the jeers, the laughter, the profanity, and the stones wore me down till I wanted to grab someone by the neck and scream, “My name is not ‘hey you,’ not ‘motherfucker.'” I wanted to chase down the person who threw that stone and beat them senseless demanding to know why they did it. And that was the heart of the frustration. I didn’t know why it was happening.

From a certain point of view, I had no doubt that these insulting behaviours were not really meant that way. The people shouting at me were not street thugs lounging around feeling mean and attacking simply because I was different. They were normal people sitting outside their shops. They saw me and the shouting began. They would probably have been horrified if they knew what a few hours in their city did to the poor foreigner at the receiving end of this attention.

Of course there was a lot more at work. The children ran beside my bike relentlessly screaming ‘give money, give money’. The hustlers gathered each time I even slowed down, let alone stopped, offering to ‘guide me.’ I felt like a giant money ship floating through space with everyone chipping away trying to get some. It was behaviour difficult to resent, since I was all too aware of the validity of their point of view. I came from the world of ‘stuff’. I dripped with stuff. And all manner of stuff was in short supply here.

I rode my bike down the street just outside the Tiru Gondar and followed it in the direction that Dawit and I took to the chat market. Traffic was light, but I really had to be on my toes. Pedestrians were a surprising difficulty. They appeared to rely on sound to warn them of an approaching vehicle and I made no sound. Again and again, they walked blindly into the streets right in front of me, totally oblivious of the danger.

Asking for directions was a total waste of time, though not without its entertainment value. Here too was a cultural gap that was better accepted and dealt with without trying too hard to understand what was going on. The names of streets were not consistent. They changed with every new government. Streets weren’t important anyway. The Ethiopians thought in terms of areas or ‘villages.’

At my first major intersection, I spotted an impressive structure with a tall tower far away at the top of a long hill. A crowd gathered when I stopped,of course, and a man offered his assistance. I asked him what that building was but got no reply that made sense. I rode up the hill thinking that the closer I got to the building the more apparent it would be what I was referring to. But it didn’t work. I learned later it was City Hall, but the people to whom I spoke simply assumed I couldn’t be asking about that building. Everyone knew it was City Hall. It fell into the category of ‘things that are known.’ You don’t ask about things that are known.

The further I rode, the happier I became with the fact that I had a bicycle. It opened up the entire city to me in a way that being on foot could never do. And it had the advantage of being able to outdistance most unwanted attention. The low gear ratio in the granny gear meant no slope was too steep. I coasted up inclines effortlessly. Some were so steep I achieved little more than a walking pace, but I got up them all the same.

Just to the east of City Hall I came across an area they called the Piazza. It was a pie-shaped section of the city full of multi-storied structures with shops, restaurants and hotels. Many of the hotels looked intriguing with verandahs and outdoor seating. Several young hustlers offered to take me to special hotels where there were more ferenjis like me. So other foreigners were out there, but I hadn’t seen any of them yet.

With these landmarks, you’d think I’d be oriented, but I was still essentially lost. It didn’t matter because I felt sure I could get back to the Tiru Gondar no matter where I ended up. I knew where I was in terms of my own physical view of the city. I just couldn’t see that layout in my maps.

I was still too new to try any photography. I wasn’t sure enough of my ground. But on one back road away from traffic I stumbled on a market. Hundreds of chickens were contained in round woven cages. I asked a man if I could take a picture of the chickens, assuming that would be safe, but when he saw my camera he quickly shouted aloud and waved “no,” and an agitated group of men gathered around me. I don’t think he was angry, but how he felt about my camera was very clear.

I was puzzling over this reaction back at the Tiru when Zebachew asked if I would take his picture. I agreed and this led to a photographic feeding frenzy as everyone wanted their picture taken. I took pictures of nearly everyone in the crazy, wonderful, extended family that ran the hotel. There was one immense older woman who had taken a shine to me since the morning when she walked into the bathroom and got an eyeful of me stark naked. She chased me around talking endlessly in Amharic and showing me things, unconscious of the fact that I didn’t understand a word. She just laughed and slapped me playfully. She ran her hands over her ample bosom, but I got the feeling she was talking about my hairy chest, which she never got over.

She dominated the photography in the back, arranging people and grabbing any stray children and plunking them on her lap. In a funny moment she lifted a breast out of her blouse and presented it to one of the children for a picture, but she quickly covered up again.

The secret to this sudden eagerness to have their picture taken was that they wanted a copy. That explained the grim and serious look that fell like a shutter over their faces when I brought the camera to bear. I was taking portraits. It made perfect sense, since a 35mm camera like mine was a rare object to have in their house and rarer still was the cash to get pictures printed.

It was a good opportunity for me to learn more about the Tiru Gondar. Most of the people who worked there also slept there at night, five of them in the basement directly underneath my spacious room. It was a damp, dark space with a dirt floor and the crumbling foundation for walls. A single bare bulb illuminated five ledges cut into the wall where a bundle of old blankets marked each sleeping spot. No furniture was evident.

I felt a weird sensation thrum through me when I realized the cobwebby beams above me were in fact the floor of my room where I’d been sleeping in my big double bed and mosquito net. I felt guilty, of course, but the practical view was that the 40 birr/night that I was putting into the family economy was far more important to them than the discomfort of sleeping in what was essentially a fruit cellar.

Three stable-like structures in the back were also rented out to guests at 15 birr/night. Three other rooms in the hotel itself were rented at 20 birr/night. Mine was the only actual hotel room. The others were simply cubicles carved out of a hallway with pieces of thin wood.

Along one side of the backyard was a small building where most of the rest of the family slept. On the other side was a water tank on top of a tall tower. One corner was reserved as a slaughtering area and in the centre of the yard was a large cement pad for drying vegetables and spices. Laundry lines criss-crossed everywhere.

The kitchen was by far the most important room in the house, since they served a lot of meals. It was small but contained a gas stove as well as kerosene cookers.

While taking pictures in the front, I noticed a tiny hutch in the corner of the compound. It was about 4 feet long and 3 feet wide, raised off the ground and had a small door on the front. I’d once caught a glimpse of a black animal running around the yard and assumed it was kept there, perhaps a pig. I asked Zebachew about it. He used the word “zebenya.” I muttered the word zebenya to myself as I thumbed through my phrasebook. Pig? I asked. No. Much laughter. Chicken? More laughter.

I finally found zebenya in my phrase book. “Guard (security)” it said. Ah, I said triumphantly. Dog. A guard dog. This sent Zebachew practically rolling on the ground with mirth. He called over his cousins, the tall and gangly Tadele and the 17-year-old Sisay (pronounced ‘sea sigh’) to share in the joke. The joke of course was that a person slept in there. They pointed out a young boy who I hadn’t really met yet and said he was the guard.

“Is he your cousin or brother?” I asked.

“No family,” said Sisay. “Fifty birr one month.”

I shook my head at this low figure, but the cousins were more practical.

“Not family. Better than street.”

I could see their point. The boy had a place to sleep out of the rain and cold and he got his meals on top of that.

Tags: bike, City Hall, Ethiopia Bike Trip, mine, Tiru Gondar