12:30 am, Sept 20th, Rodeo Addis:
Back at the Rodeo, dance beats pumping out from under the giant metal cowboy hat just across from my back (and only) window… Thinking about how much I hate language barriers. Woke up today quite early, thanks to accidentally setting my watch wrong, and expecting Shimeles to show up and greet me at any moment. I read the Christian Science Monitor and ate a slow breakfast, and the ladies here were nice enough to make me a wonderful omlette and fresh squeezed OJ. Corn flakes with warm milk… hmmm… I like warm milk- reminds me of being little and having bad dreams, when Marmie would make me warm milk because it would make me sleep like a log. Anyway, I decided against a shower (don’t want the skin to dry out too much!) and opted eventually to venture out along the Bole Road… First taste of real Ethiopia, of Addis, and it was much more intensely African, and 3rd world, than I had expected it to be. Bole is supposedly the center of all the new development, but it was very much like the chaos of Marrakesh, only magnified several times. But the city is perched in some very pretty hills, the weather is pleasant, and most everyone is either very nice or indifferent, which is a wonderful surprise. I chatted with a young fellow, Fessal, who recognized me from the Rodeo, and we chatted a bit and he offered to come pick me up later and show me around, be my history guide… I told him I’d love to, but in all honesty I knew I would be plenty busy with Shimeles, who is my official guide anyway. I didn’t walk any further than the Ethio-China road, and then returned to Rodeo, not wanting to miss Shime, but I ended up waiting at least another two and a half hours there, though quite patiently. This is Africa, I told myself, and you have to be patient or you’ll go crazy. Besides, what did it matter? So I read my book and managed to get sleepy again before Shime finally showed up (aside from my clock being wrong, he also had had to pick up a friend from the airport, who’s flight was late). We ran a series of interesting errands around town, and I found myself both drawn to and repulsed by Addis, but on all levels captivated. We stopped at the new Brazilian Embassy, where Shimeles had to talk to some cohorts, and the embassy was a little island of quasi-modernity in a sea of neo-industrial chaos and slum. Then we visited the Government Offices of Water Concerns, where Shim was advising a friend on the use of magneto equipment the government was using to study the Addis aquifer. Government offices are all spectacularly run down communist relics, with junked cars, poker-faced guards who seem to be wanting for any actual purpose, and dismal overgrown junk piles. Everyone in the office was very friendly, but as usual, everyone converses in Amharic, and only breaks into very occasional and brief English for my benefit, to tell a joke or ask me a polite question. Then on to the University, another communist or imperial era affair, derelict and overgrown, and I was stunned at the inadequacy of the facilities and the unceremonious way the university was just tucked in among the crowd and squalor of the central city, which was every bit as dirty and chaotic and shoddy as any other part of town seemed to be. Even the famed Sheraton was nothing as grand as I’d expected it. To my surprise, there is no ‘nice part of town,’ no good and bad neighborhoods. Expensive villas (though still unimpressive by American standards) are shoved right in among the most jaw-dropping hovels I’ve ever seen. Most people seem to be getting along alright, busily going about their daily business, whatever it is, anywhere you go, and all mixing freely. Paved thoroughfares sporadically turn to dirt tracks and twist though sheet metal shantytowns lined with hundreds of identical little shops selling a few bizarre items, few of which seem like necessities, but rather whatever the seller could get their hands on. Shops selling top end clothing and furniture still look trashy on the outside, and are housed right in among all the other rickety constructions. Yet for the most part, people are smiling, laughing, talking and coping with their ridiculous situation, a juxtaposition of rural people in with the marvels (cheaply imitated) of Western societies, and all with the most impractical results. Along the new ‘loop road,’ pride of Addis, cars move about in the most chaotic and unruly fashion imaginable, while throngs of people shepherd goats and elderly relatives awkwardly but patiently across the massive cement barriers of the loop road, just another obstacle to their daily routine which they good-naturedly and patiently traverse. At the geophysical observatory (I had imagined something fancy to fit the name… rather, a tiny old decaying greenhouse housing ancient equipment and peeling paint, and the most distinguished geophysicists Africa has to offer.) I met Shimeles’ wonderful and convivial colleagues, and we tried to accomplish some things at his office, a nice but small room in a defunct astrological observatory building, where the internet was so slow that it took about 10 full minutes to load a single page, if you were lucky. We went to a nearby café for lunch, where I had my first Ethiopian meal, red and white injera with curried beef and spinach, and I must say it was quite delicious. Shimeles also invited a young female student to join us, a beautiful, busty girl younger than me, who had just graduated from Arba Minch in economics, and who I eventually surmised Shime was either boinking or planned to. I suspect he has quite a few such ‘good friends.’ It rained hard on us at the Café, and afterwards we went to the Mapping Agency, an even more spectacularly communist creation, which, while the rain had stopped outside, was still raining inside. Yet despite the collapsing offices, the aimless armed soldiers, and fabled likelihood of finding the appropriate officials away from their offices indefinitely, getting our hands on government topo maps was amazingly easy and unmarred by the bribery and bureaucracy which had so annoyed me in Ukraine, even though the conditions there were paradise by comparison. Armed with topo maps and the assurance that if we ventured too close to the border, to capture points at “H” and “MAND”, there was a very decent chance of being captured ourselves and held indefinitely by armed Eritrean-funded gorillas. We looked briefly for tents to purchase should lodging in the northern Afar be impossible to come by, and after an unsuccessful stop where a shopkeeper used the pretense of showing us photos of tents to show us his entire photo collection from the last five years, Shim drove me back to Rodeo, where I slept hard for two hours and awoke groggy. He picked me up at 6:30, and we went (after several minutes of white knuckle driving on the madhouse Bole road and a stop to pick up some fresh chat) to his friend Mohammed’s nice villa nearby where we caught the tail end of a Ramadan post-fasting feast, and I met some of Mohammed’s nice friends, who chatted with me intermittently in English about politics and economics and chat and other brief, polite matters, before I was encouraged to shove a huge ball of minced chat into my cheek and suck on it (to my great despair) for almost an hour before I finally realized I had to slowly swallow the putrid stuff, and managed to choke it down over a bottle of water and much coaxing of my saliva and bulging of the eyes, until I finally finished and retired onto the couch with a minor headache and sore gums. I rejected any further offers to chew more chat, although the other guys continued to consume unfathomable quantities for the rest of the evening, in addition to smoking from a large hookah. Shimeles went over some of the basics of magneto-tellurics with me, which was quite fascinating, but we were interrupted by the start of the Arsenal-Seville soccer match (where the hell is Arsenal from, anyway?) and I watched that for a good 2 hours, because everyone had fallen into frantic, chat – fueled conversations and there was no hope of interjecting myself in somewhere because it was quite plain no one was really in the mood to talk in English anymore. I felt like it was probably time to extricate myself, and felt a little helpless for a half-hour after the game while Shimeles smoked the hookah, and I stared blankly at the television, watching them report the soccer scores over and over hoping that he would offer to take me home, which he finally did. I can tell this will be an interesting trip. I’m not sure I’m cut out for the human chaos that is Africa, along with the language isolation that so frustrated me on my Europe trip with Hans. My type of chaos is on a wild river or on a wind-whipped ridgeline, where the language is universal and much is understood while little is said. The squalor is hard for me to get used to… I can be infinitely friendly, but seething humanity has never really thrilled me, and that certainly doesn’t seem to have changed on the way here. Yet every now and again, I see something beautiful in the interactions coursing back and forth between all those magnificent black faces, the white smiles, red tongues, and gentle persistence at living. I’m also nervous about the Afar… Shimeles seems to know that there is a real and large danger there, and my self-assurance about the safety of the expedition is rapidly melting away. But then, maybe a little action, danger and desolation is exactly what I need to relieve me from this city-induced funk. Never did like cities. We’ll know more later. Ciao~