Amsterdam Schipol, 6:15am, October 24:

I’m happy to report that five weeks in Ethiopia have cured me of a bad case of negrophobia which was festering for 24 years in Montana, Land of Diversity. After wandering into the airport alone (with a bit of trepidation and sadness… bye Shimeles! Sniff!) I made it to the departure gate and noticed with no small degree of disgust that the white farenges had completely segregated themselves into one half of the seating area, leaving the smaller group of Ethiopian travelers to do their thing on one long row of benches along the opposite wall. Should I go sit with the sour-faced Frenchies, Germans, Dutchers and pot-bellied tourists from Memphis? Boooooor-ing! I backed up, walked down and around to the far side of the room and along the bench full of happy, chatty Ethiopians, and sat down on the one unoccupied seat. After squeezing all that I could out of my few memorized Amharic phrases, I was cheerfully talking and laughing with several nice women and making faces at the unbelievably cute little girls next to me who decided to sing me nursery rhymes in Orominya. What fun! With immense satisfaction I watched out of the corner of my eye as my milky-skinned counterparts glared at me silently from across the room. I love these people! (Ethiopians) They’re so warm, and beautiful, and good-natured… And where else can you get a marriage proposal after five minutes of pleasant conversation?
As I tried to board, the scanning machine beeped and the woman told me I’d have to have my bag searched. Ok, all my luggage was searched when I entered the airport, and my carry on was searched again when I went into the departure area, but I waited patiently for a guard to come. Well, I noticed that of several hundred people getting on the flight, I was the only one waiting to be searched. Just my luck. Then the guard came up and told me to leave my carry on there and to follow him. Uh-oh. We walked out of the departure area, down the hall, then through a security door, down a long flight of cement stairs, and through another door right out onto the tarmac, and into a chaotic mass of conveyor belts and trucks and shouting security personnel, and over to a scanning machine where I saw one of the big duffels laying on its side. Must be the mast. They already threw a fit about that one at the entrance to the airport. I opened the bag and took out the mast, and was correct in that they wanted to inspect it. Admittedly, I’m sure it looks like some sort of rifle through the x-ray scanner. I opened it up but this time, it was too loud all around me to be able to properly explain the purpose of the mast, and the military guys who were going through the unit looked extremely skeptical. Then they found the case of machined pins which fit into the steel monuments, and I knew right away they thought they were bullets. God, you should have seen their eyes bulge. But I stayed very friendly and non-chalant, and after a bit of scrutinizing my face for signs of terrorist-sympathy, they let me pack it up again and sent me back up to the gate. The flight was actually, I won’t say painless, but not so bad as I’d feared. I was sitting next to a nice Ethiopian girl about my age who was returning to study in Toronto after visiting her family in Addis for a few months. I felt like sleeping almost as soon as we took off, but the seat was spectacularly uncomfortable and I writhed in agony, trying to find some position where I could doze off without experiencing muscle spasms in my neck and back. Impossible. I felt miserable and my eyes started getting puffy from the dry air and lack of sleep. Then my body passed some sort of discomfort threshold and flipped an emergency switch, and I fell into the strangest, deepest sleep. I woke up from time to time, but it felt like looking out at the world from within a coma… my medulla oblongata felt like it had turned to lead, and the dirty motor oil was back and sloshing behind my optic nerves. The stewards served me several meals, but I could only look at them from where I had slumped into my seat… I was physically unable to move a muscle toward it. And had I not been so inclined to give myself to sleep, it would have been a rather scary feeling. However, after slumbering like this on and off for about five hours, I woke up and felt better, and had some food and the next thing I knew we were landing in pre-dawn Amsterdam.
I savored the way the flight attendants in their blue KLM skirts and funny hats made the announcements in rich, thick Netherlands Dutch. The glorious way they gave guttural passion to words like ‘glaamstuumbrringste’ was making me horny, and I decided that if all Dutch girls are as unbearably sexy as the KLM flight attendants, I would turn in my geology texts and dedicate myself to the art of Dutch seduction. Even as I type this, some invisible (but surely delicious) Dutch vixen is announcing in an erotic voice that ‘denterguurning der flichsatch goombinhaanink vis blartinhuusenving’… Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty to me… don’t stop, don’t stop!

Amazing how sad I felt to be leaving Addis when all I did for the past month was bitch in my journal about how eager I was to get the hell out of there and come home. Suddenly, everything seemed so inviting… the smell of shiro cooking somewhere, the friendly girls and laughing black faces, the chaos of the markets and flickering lights, the vast neighborhoods of mud-metal shanties that were pitch dark in the cool highland night air, except for corrugated tin roofs reflecting a bit of moonlight… I thought of Shimeles, and Mimo and Hewit and Root, and briefly felt agonized that I wasn’t back in Shimeles’ apartment talking with them, and sleeping on Shim’s couch for another day of adventure in that crazy capital. But the feeling is fading soon enough. It was high time for me to make my departure. And I’m glad to know I felt that way at the end… it’s true, for the past few weeks, everything had gone so right, and so well… Shim did his very best to insure that I would miss Ethiopia when he left, and (though I was still darn eager to leave) he succeeded, I’m quite sure. I think I’ll be happy to go back, after I’ve had at least a half-year’s recuperation. Ah, silly farenj. Mountains, I’m coming home to you. Wild skies and grey snowy twilight, I’m coming back, I’m yours, if you’ll just embrace me and let me slip into your desolate, unfeeling arms. So blissfully, so joyfully, so much right where I belong.

Now, let’s go tour the Amsterdam Airport! There’s a museum here, did you know that? And cigarette boxes that exclaim it great red letters, SMOKING KILLS YOUR BABY. And Dutch porn. Does it feature KLM flight attendants? I’ll have to check it out. (Just kidding, mom!)
I only wish that my carry-ons were lighter. I packed every heavy item I could into my Kelty so that I wouldn’t have to cough up millions for overweight luggage, and it worked… only a few pounds over, and a manageable $50 fine. But it means that walking around the shops and hallways makes my shoulders ache, and this damn laptop, I’m certain, is if nothing else, the heaviest one on the market. Damn thing feels like one of Moses’ stone tablets, or a block of Danakil salt. It’s supposed to have no moving parts, and thus be very impact resistant, but I haven’t dropped it yet, so I’ve not been able to test that one. However, I’m sure that it is theft-resistant. Any schmuck who tried to snatch this thing from me and run would have his arm drop off before he made it a hundred yards. Wow, it’s seven o’clock and still dark outside. I guess I’m not on the equator any more. I forgot about that part of winter in the northern latitudes. Well, a third of my return trip is over, and I’m in a damn good mood. Hope this lasts. I wonder how bloodshot my eyes will be when I finally stumble off that plane into the cold Missoula night? Oh, that will be sweet! How I miss my family, and my girlfriend, and Mr. Hans and company. It eased a little toward the end, as I made a few friends abroad… but only a little.
Final note: not impressed with the security measures. The mast unit is an obvious security concern. I mean, it looks quite a bit like a disassembled elephant gun. But I easily made it onto the airplane with both a nail clippers and enough anti-worm suspension liquid to make a neat little avaquinone bomb. And nobody even asked to look in my backpack which contains three receivers and two bipods and one sat-phone and by God, if I was in charge of scanning backpacks for suspicious materials, I’ve have the bomb squad interrogating me in the dungeon right now. Not good enough, guys… gotta do better, or one of these times someone’s going to start clipping their toenails at 39,000 feet. Very worrisome.
Maybe one more entry in Minneapolis? If the battery holds out?