Ethiopia seems to be a flat, cool, and wealthy country, which experiences frequent rainfall. Oh wait, I'm not in Ethiopia yet. This is England. I'm coming toward the end of my 42-hour layover in this country, where I've seen aunt and uncle and grandmother and brother--Michael arrived at Heathrow an hour and a half before me and kindly waited for me to get in so that we could take the bus to Oxford together--and pounded out the last bits of work on my keyboard so that I can go to Ethiopia with a clear conscience. Sleep is another matter, but at least I've got a head start on jet lag.
The plan is to fly into Addis Ababa at 3:30 am (local time) on May 2nd--for reasons I don't fully understand, flights into Addis Ababa seem only to arrive between midnight and 4 am--zip over to the train station, catch a 5:30 am bus to Bahir Dar, and be on the shore of Lake Tana by mid-afternoon on the 2nd. And hopefully my body won't be so outraged with me that it can't do a coherent job of making sure it has a bed for the night and getting safely into that bed for a long long sleep at a reasonable hour.
At the moment, it's hard to believe I'm actually going. The past week has been an insane rush to finish up all sorts of things that have had me grounded in my ordinary life far more than usual. There are also all the anxieties of not being quite sure what the hell I'm getting into by visiting a country unlike any I've ever visited before and those anxieties can only be soothed (or intensified) once I've had a few days to find out what it's actually like on the ground. Hopefully I'll find my way to some internet in the next few days and let you know what I find.
