Rodeo, Top Floor Terrace, 6am, Sept. 23rd:
It seems impossible to sleep through a full night in Africa. This morning around 4am, two large dogs (probably rabid) started barking at each other directly below my balcony window (which I have to keep open to prevent being suffocated by the mildew smell in my new room)… and they kept at it, quite ferociously, for a good two hours. Much, much worse than that little yapper outside our place on 2nd street, Halle. Un-ignorable. Eventually, I was doing a cost-benefit analysis on tromping out into the courtyard and slitting both their throats with my leatherman, but lucky for all of us, they finally shut up. The electricity came back on around 5pm, and I turned on the TV to Al Jazeera news (that’s deceptive… Al Jazeera is the ONLY channel on the TV, anyway) and discovered that they were just cycling through the exact same stories as last night. News reruns! Aaargh! I read another 30 pages in my Michael Palin book, which has me worried that I’ll be out of reading material far earlier than anticipated, and will spend the next 20 nights laying awake in bed, wishing I had something to do. What with roosters crowing, muezzins chanting into their bullhorns from the mosques, dogs yapping and cars honking, I’m a bit eager to escape the city. We’ll see what I say in a few days. Oh yes, I moved up in the world: I decided that if I’m going to be stuck indefinitely at the EDSONATRA hotel (it’s not really the Rodeo Addis, remember?) I’m sick of having a tiny closet of a room, so I splurged for the top-floor suite with a great terrace and view and bathroom all to myself, plus a firm king sized bed and internet connection. Of course, there have been a few drawbacks. The room reeks like mildew when the window to the balcony is closed, the TV has only one station, the electricity is off all night, and most frustrating, something is messed with the wireless network which makes it impossible to sign on. I must have spent three hours last evening dicking with the network settings on my computer (probably annoying the hell out of the guy at the front desk who was helplessly trying to help me) before finally giving up in total disgust. I was so looking forward to being able to shoot off a few hundred emails while I wait for Shimeles to drag his lazy ass out of bed and come drive me around.
Which brings me to Shimeles: I am extremely frustrated with him right now. We were supposed to leave Addis for Afar 48 hours ago, and it’s unlikely we’ll leave town any earlier than tomorrow afternoon, if that. Yet I honestly don’t see what the hell is holding us up. We have a discreet and finite list of things to accomplish before leaving, but every day, he comes and picks me up a little bit later (noon, yesterday!) and we drive to the university and check our email (he spends an hour checking the sports scores for his favorite teams) and I try to do anything I can to prepare, but there’s really nothing left to do at the University! I don’t understand why we didn’t just grab all the equipment the first day, but instead we’ve been grabbing it one piece each day, turning one hour’s worth of hard work into 6 days worth! I feel helpless and mad, because there’s really not a lot I can do without Shimeles’s help: I can’t call the Army to ask permission, I can’t write out our letter of introduction in Amharic, I can’t locate a driver for us, I can’t make us leave town. Shimeles insists that we need all this extra time to get ready, but we never DO anything to get there! We check our email, he drives me around town for an hour, apparently looking for the proper place to eat lunch and maybe just showing off his city driving skills, and then takes me back to the motel and says “See you tomorrow.” !!! Why did I come here six days ago when I’ve done nothing but sit at the motel every morning waiting for him to show up, drive around, eat lunch, and then walk around aimlessly wondering if Tomorrow will be the day we leave? Yesterday, he dropped me off around 1:30 pm, when we should have gone to get the other sleeping bag, long sleeve shirts, toilet papers, water, dry goods, mosquito nets, sand bags, government permission, stationary, photocopies of my letter of introduction from the UM… and all the things he says he needs to spend the rest of the day doing, when I ask him the next day, he’s never done! I hate to think he’s dragging his feet and being lazy, because he’s being so kind to help us get this field work done, and in all honesty, it certainly couldn’t be done without his help… but I feel like if the tables were turned, and he had flown into Missoula to do field work and I was to help him, I would have made sure to have had everything done ahead of time, and wouldn’t have taken more than a day to tie up all the last loose ends, and wouldn’t make him slum around Missoula for seven days of an already tight-scheduled trip! I am starting to really worry that we will hardly pull anything off. Shimeles does not seem like he’ll be an ‘animal in the field;’ he already told me he doesn’t think we can set up four stations at one time as Becks and Simon dictated, and now, with Monday our supposed departure date, he’s gone and put off all the things we should have been doing the last six days off till then! How are we ever going to get out of town?? And he probably will pick me up late, and we’ll have to go find Teodros, and do a million things around town, and eat a long lunch, and we’ll probably not get 10 kilometers out of town before having to stop for the night. If he can’t get up earlier than 9 or 10am, how the shit are we going to double-time this field work to catch up on the time already lost?? Obviously, I’m freaking out internally. Plus it doesn’t help that Shimeles seems utterly disinterested in me as a person. He hasn’t asked me a SINGLE question about myself. Our conversations are completely one sided (“So Shimeles, tell me…”) and I feel less at ease around him that I did with Jay in Holben’s lab. It’s very hard being the new kid, knows next to nothing about Geophysics, can’t speak the local lingo, can’t do shit for himself… and yet have to be the guy to say, “Listen, this is not happening. We need to start BUSTING ASS, NOW.”

So.

What else can I bitch about? I don’t like cities. The Ethiopians are very nice, but I’m tired of choking on exhaust fumes and sitting on my butt all day. I’d like to visit the Ethnological Museum, but since I never know when Shimeles is going to show up to pick me up in the morning, it’s pretty hard to know when I’ll have time to visit. Maybe on the way back, or maybe this afternoon.
Oh yeah. I got bit by my first African mosquitoes two nights ago. I saw the big suckers flying around the room when I woke up around 2am, and closed the window and hunted them down to squash them, and discovered they were already gorged with my blood. That was an exciting discovery, considering I hadn’t started taking my malaria pills yet because everyone told me Addis was too high up for mosquitoes. Ah well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and start the pills today and hopefully not come down with Malaria. Then yesterday morning I started feeling the first signs of a seriously upset stomach, and it wasn’t too hard to draw a probable link back to the previous night when I’d had a few bites of a green salad before remembering that uncooked vegetables were strictly off-limits in Africa. So, it hasn’t gotten too bad yet, some mild discomfort and diarrhea, lots of gurgling and farting. I took some Acidophilus pills, and maybe that will clear it up. Could have been much worse, for sure, but a good reminder of how careful I need to be. Much easier to go hungry than to get violently ill.

Driving in this city. Jesus. I’m sure Halle knows what it’s like from scootering around Mysore, but for those who’ve never taken to the roads in a 3rd world city… Take your blood pressure meds. There are absolutely no rules, there are 10 million cars, the roads are horrible, and everyone is violently impatient (especially Shime). You have to force your way into everything, because if you don’t, nobody is going to be courteous. Forcing means you make people choose immediately between a horrible accident or slowing just enough to give you the 1mm of space you need to squeeze by (at 40 mph, of course). In fact, 1mm seems generous. Rarely more than 5 or 6 seconds go by without Shimeles laying on his horn, and the greatest courtesy paid to pedestrians is honking at them if it seems you are going to run them down. Brushing up against pedestrians as you blast by is no big deal… common practice, in fact. As long as neither party is permanently dented, no harm is done. Lanes of traffic are ignored. Three lanes? Six cars can fit abreast on the road, all honking and cutting each other off. It’s like some insane melee battle, a massive game of ‘chicken’ where everyone’s playing against everyone else. For the first two days, I clutched horrified at the ‘oh-shit’ handles, preparing at every moment for a violent collision. After a while, though, it’s just too much work to be scared, and you slump in your seat and watch casually while pedestrians throw themselves out of the way, sparing their lives by an inch, the gas pedal mashing, the brakes squealing, rolling down the window to shout curses, drag racing past a stoplight and through a busy intersection, swerving around cars and watching casually as drivers sneak around each other with cars close enough to squish a mosquito between them.

And of course, everything’s a Toyota.