I'm back in Bahir Dar after three days in Lalibela, where the internet is super slow and four times as expensive as it is in Bahir Dar, which is why I've waited till now to update the blog. It takes a minimum of two days to get from Lalibela to the capital of Addis Ababa by bus, so I decided to break up the journey by returning to Bahir Dar, where I plan to spend tomorrow relaxing on the beautiful lakefront patio of the Ghion Hotel, as well as making a trip out to see the Blue Nile Falls, which I missed on my last visit. As if to announce that I'd made a good choice in coming back, I stepped out of my room at the Ghion just after checking in and a sizeable tortoise ambled across my path.
The trip from Lalibela to Bahir Dar featured the worst and the best of travel in Ethiopia. Despite being Ethiopia's premier tourist destination, Lalibela is removed from any major roads, so I needed to take a two-hour minibus to the junction town of Gashena and then hope to find a free seat on a bus or minibus passing through Gashena in the direction of Bahir Dar. After getting bad information about when to catch the minibus, I finally found myself on one a bit late at 9:30am, having agreed on the standard 50 birr fare. I was squeezed next to two Japanese tourists, who'd been deceitfully told it would cost 100 birr, and so when the guy asked me to pay my fare and I gave him 50, he insisted on 100. (In general, I found Lalibela a rather difficult town in terms of children and adults trying to plead or scam or manipulate money out of me.) I told him that I'd been told 50 and he refused to carry me, and I refused to pay up, so I had to get out of the minibus and wait another half hour or so (and turn down a few other inflated-price offers) before finally a minibus was willing to take me at the standard rate. This isn't just thriftiness on my part: it's that I refuse to support the idea that it's acceptable to rip off foreigners. Even though this was the bad part of the trip, I should add that I was helped a lot by Jordi, a local guide who also helped me get the bus from Mekele to Lalibela four days earlier, and through all his help never got a commission nor asked for a tip (I gave him one at the end anyway).
The good part of the trip began about half an hour after I arrived in Gashena. Along with Taka and Masae, the lovely Japanese couple I'd been squeezed next to on the earlier overpriced minibus, I hitched a ride in a super-comfy 4x4, carrying four guys from Addis who work for an agricultural insurance firm that offers insurance for smallholder farmers using a system that's closely related to microfinance. They'd been assessing risk indexes in the farmland around Lalibela (and seeing Lalibela's churches for the first time in their lives), and were heading back to Bahir Dar for some more meetings. Not only did they do the reverse of gouge us on the price--I thought I'd agreed to a slightly-inflated-but-totally-fair-for-4x4-comfort 200 birr, but at the end of the trip the driver insisted I pay only 150 birr--but they also went out of their way to help Taka and Masae, who were trying to get to Gonder, which is in the opposite direction from Bahir Dar after the junction town of Werota. After dropping Taka and Masae at the Werota bus station, the Ethiopians refused to leave until they were sure that Taka and Masae were on a bus, they assisted in negotiations, and insisted on driving them to Bahir Dar when it was clear that they couldn't get a fair price in Werota. They also spoke excellent English and made for fascinating conversation. Not only did I have a long chat about Ethiopian politics, and the disappointment of the rigged 2005 election, but I also had the lyrics to a number of Teddy Afro songs explained to me. Teddy Afro is Ethiopia's most popular singer, and you hear his music absolutely everywhere, including our 4x4. A rather cheesy ballad took on rather touching significance when I learned that it was a love song where the singer mourns his separation from his Eritrean lover. With none-too-subtle political overtones, the song wishes for peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea so that the singer can be reunited with his lover. Teddy Afro has been imprisoned in the past on what are generally thought to be trumped-up charges for taking stances critical of the ruling political party.
But at this point you're probably thinking, "what about those three days in Lalibela? What was that about Lalibela being Ethiopia's premier tourist destination?" If you're like me before I read my Ethiopia travel book, you may never have even heard of Lalibela. If it were in Egypt or Jordan instead of Ethiopia, it would be (nearly) as famous as the Pyramids or Petra. But because it's in Ethiopia, it's largely escaped the notice of the wider world (although that said, it was the only place I've been in Ethiopia where you really did pass a white person every five minutes). But, to cut to the chase, Lalibela was Ethiopia's capital during the Zagwe dynasty from roughly the 10th to 13th centuries, and is named for its most famous king, who, during the 12th century (clear enough on dates, Eddie?), oversaw the construction of eleven churches dug out of the rock.
By "dug out of the rock," what I mean is that, over about 24 years, 40,000 labourers dug into the red volcanic rock and carved ornate monolithic and semi-monolithic churches whose roofs stand at ground level, and whose foundations lie ten or more metres down below. The sight is truly awesome to behold, even if all but one of the churches is now covered by hyper-modern white roofing supplied by the European Union to protect them from centuries of erosion. The roofing doesn't quite manage the ironic elegance of I. M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre, but I suppose it's better than letting the churches crumble.
The churches stand in three clusters. The northwest cluster is the most impressive, featuring Bet Medhane Alem, which, at 11.5m in height and 800 square metres in area, is the largest monolithic rock-hewn church in the world, as well as the smaller Bet Maryam, with a breathtakingly elaborate interior. I had to keep reminding myself that these structures were dug straight out of the rock. Bet Medhane Alem has the dimensions of a sizeable church, and the only difference between its pillars and the ones in a normal stone church is that there are no fissures where stone slabs were placed on top of one another because the whole church is one single massive piece of rock. Especially because the white roofing prevents any distance shots, the whole thing has to be seen to be believed.
The southeast cluster is a little more scattered, with long tunnels and winding passages leading between churches, making me think that the eight-year-old me who thrilled at exploring the ruined castles of the Welsh border would have been in seventh heaven racing around between these churches. And even the adult me kind of wished he had nieces and nephews here with whom he could play the world's greatest game of hide-and-go-seek.
Separate from the two other clusters, Bet Giyorgis stands on its own, and is probably the picture you'll see if you do a google image search of Lalibela, because it's the only one of the churches that isn't covered in roofing (yup: just checked). It's also sublimely beautiful in its cruciform shape, even if the interior is a little disappointing.
I swear, the person who's missed out the most in not knowing more about Ethiopia is Steven Spielberg. This place would have been perfect for an Indiana Jones film. Wandering about the churches yesterday with a Dutch couple, we started plotting out the whole thing. Pre-WWII Ethiopia occupied by Italian fascists--who naturally need a few Nazi advisors to give Indy someone to clash wits with--the real location of the Ark of the Covenant at stake, not to mention an ancient Christian culture with its own mysterious rites and dark secrets: the film really just writes itself.
My first visit to the churches at Lalibela couldn't have been better. I'd arrived late afternoon from Mekele following a route that didn't go by the churches, so I hadn't seen them when I arrived. That evening I met an English couple halfway through a Cape-to-Cairo motorbike trip (I really like English people) who were getting a guided tour of the churches the following day and had been invited by their guide to drop in at a pre-dawn ceremony at Bet Meskel, one of the smaller churches in the northwest cluster. They offered to let me join their tour, starting with the ceremony.
Each one of the churches has particular associations that make different days sacred for different churches. Each church has a special ceremony about once a month, where the priests stay up all night chanting and praying, and last Thursday night was Bet Meskel's special night. So after getting up before 5 the previous day to catch an early bus from Mekele, I got up before 5 again on Friday morning so that I could catch the last hour of the ceremony before the priests went off to bed at dawn. When Anna, Kristian, and I arrived, it was still dark, so my first view of the churches was of these shadowy masses looming up from down below me. Without any proper orientation as to where I was, I descended into the rock, passed through a tunnel, and found myself in a smallish square on the outside of a circle of about twenty priests, all clad head to toe in white, swaying back and forth and chanting in Ge'ez, accompanied only by a drum and these metal rattle-like things that they'd shake for a kind of tambourine effect. I've never been so glad that my camera has a video function. Gradually, the dawn light seeped through the blackness, and the rocks around me changed from a shadowy grey to dark reddish brown to increasingly paler reddish brown. By a bit after 6, it was unmistakably day, and the drumming and chanting climaxed and calmed down, and people slowly filed into Bet Meskel or off to wherever they were going to sleep.
Not only are the churches of Lalibela astonishing monuments of a long-dead dynasty, they're also very much living temples of Christian worship. In case Spielberg needed further incentive.
After heading back to the hotel for breakfast, Kristian, Anna, and I rejoined our guide, Agiew, who gave us the official tour of the churches. To be frank, the tour was a bit disappointing, but the churches themselves weren't, and since I'd given myself three days in Lalibela (and since the $20 (!!!) admission ticket is good for five days), I was able to come back yesterday and tour around a bit by myself and a bit with the fun Dutch couple that was staying in my hotel and who I ran into halfway through my day at the churches.
The churches in Lalibela are definitely the town's highlight, but they aren't the only churches in the area. On Saturday, I spent the morning hiking up to Asheton Maryam, a church up a mountain overlooking the town. Lalibela itself is at a cool 2600m above sea level, and Asheton Maryam must have been at least another 500m higher. The church itself was nothing compared to the ones in town, but the hike was lovely--barring the fact that I was followed almost the entire way by prospective guides and pestering children ("Hello pen!" "Hello money!" I seriously worry about the future of a country where it seems 90% of the children grow up thinking it's normal and acceptable to ask foreigners to give them things for no reason at all.) A steep climb up beyond the church took me to a beautiful small plateau overlooking the town and much of the surrounding countryside. I could happily have spent an hour up there relaxing if I hadn't forgot to bring a hat to protect me from the midday sun and if I hadn't been joined by a young man who'd appeared from seemingly nowhere and was slowly working his way toward asking me to give him money.
On the way up to Asheton Maryam, I passed crowds of villagers coming down the same road, with donkeys loaded with goods. Saturday is Lalibela's market day, and the Lalibela market is deservedly famous, drawing in people from the surrounding villages, many of them making several hours' journey to buy, sell, and trade. It was great fun wandering about the stalls, which were selling everything from clothes to food (I finally got to see the tef grain from which injera is made) to (my personal highlight) flip-flops for farmers made out of used car tires.
And what does one do on a Saturday night in this holiest of Ethiopian cities? Why, one watches the Champions League Final, of course. Ethiopians are soccer-crazy, and it's all over TV screens, so the most important club-level match of the year was a must-see. I was also with Till and Wilma, who aren't great soccer fans, but felt they had to go out and support Bayern Munich, who were unlikely finalists against Chelsea. For my own part, and despite being almost entirely ignorant about soccer, I was on Bayern's side partly because Franck Ribery is sublime (and Robben and Schweinsteiger are pretty great too) and partly because I object in principle to teams like Chelsea and Manchester City that are effectively the playthings of billionaire owners.
Till, Wilma, and I found our way to a small cafe/bar that had been converted into a viewing area, with loads of chairs and a big-by-Ethiopian-standards screen set up at the far end. We were the only Westerners in a crowd of about 80 Ethiopians, and judging from the cheers, I'd say that they were at least 90% Chelsea partisans. This has mostly to do with the unhealthy respect Ethiopians seem to have for the English Premiership. Of the conversation-openers I meet with in my walks around Ethiopian cities, one of my favourites is "what is your favourite team in the English Premiership?" It's one of my favourites because it seems to me to be the one that most genuinely reaches out to try to form a friendship. Questions like "What is your country?" inevitably reinforce a sense of distance between the questioner and the answerer, but who your favourite football club is can genuinely create a sense of fellowship. More's the pity, then, that I know far too little about English club football to bond over this question. "I'm more into ice hockey" usually draws blank stares and only serves to reinforce whatever distance there already was between us (I was trying to guess where the nearest ice rink is, and figure it's probably in Dubai or Israel), but I really can't honestly claim to have a favourite club. The only clubs where I know the names of more than two players are clubs like Chelsea, which I object to for reasons mentioned above, or Manchester United, which is more a massively successful marketing phenomenon than a sports team. So, sadly, I end up struggling a bit in football conversations with Ethiopians, especially since they all seem to have encyclopedic knowledge of all things football-related.
A secondary reason for Chelsea's popularity on this occasion (it seems Manchester United is generally the runaway favourite) is that their star striker, Didier Drogba, is a fellow African. Seeing the delight in the crowd as Drogba scored the equalizing goal in the 88th minute and then the winning penalty in the shootout (a further injustice is that Bayern overwhelmingly outplayed Chelsea and didn't deserve to lose), it struck me how remarkable pan-African pride is. Ethiopia and Drogba's Ivory Coast have next to nothing--geographically, ethnically, historically, linguistically, culturally--in common, but because Drogba's African, he's still a hero. Imagine a Spaniard cheering on a Polish athlete because he's European. It just wouldn't happen.
And that pretty much brings me to the end of this rather long post. But since I'm heading back to the big bad city of Addis Ababa tomorrow, I should say a few quick words in praise of donkeys, who I'll probably be seeing less of in Addis. In the course I taught this spring, I required students to give group presentations on different animals of their choice, where they discuss the biology, human uses, cultural significance, etc., of an animal of their choice. One of the best of the bunch was a presentation on donkeys, which brought out their importance to third-world economies, as well as giving an insightful treatment of their symbolic role as humble beasts of burden (as well as stupid asses). Donkeys are everywhere in Ethiopia, and the respect that I first learned from my students has developed into a deep love. They're remarkably strong for their small size, incredibly hard working, and gentle creatures to boot. Jase described them as broken-spirited, which I suppose is true, but in them I see (what may amount to the same thing) a spirit of resignation. Resignation to one's fate, to the fact that life is hard but must be endured, is central to every religion, and I couldn't help but see in the gentle resignation of donkeys a truly spiritual genius. This might sound like the worst kind of anthropomorphism, but donkeys strike me as quintessentially religious animals. And thinking in that vein gives a new perspective on the significance of Christ's riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Certainly, being in a country that relies so heavily on their labour gives me a deeper understanding of the symbolic significance of donkeys in Western literature.
The trip from Lalibela to Bahir Dar featured the worst and the best of travel in Ethiopia. Despite being Ethiopia's premier tourist destination, Lalibela is removed from any major roads, so I needed to take a two-hour minibus to the junction town of Gashena and then hope to find a free seat on a bus or minibus passing through Gashena in the direction of Bahir Dar. After getting bad information about when to catch the minibus, I finally found myself on one a bit late at 9:30am, having agreed on the standard 50 birr fare. I was squeezed next to two Japanese tourists, who'd been deceitfully told it would cost 100 birr, and so when the guy asked me to pay my fare and I gave him 50, he insisted on 100. (In general, I found Lalibela a rather difficult town in terms of children and adults trying to plead or scam or manipulate money out of me.) I told him that I'd been told 50 and he refused to carry me, and I refused to pay up, so I had to get out of the minibus and wait another half hour or so (and turn down a few other inflated-price offers) before finally a minibus was willing to take me at the standard rate. This isn't just thriftiness on my part: it's that I refuse to support the idea that it's acceptable to rip off foreigners. Even though this was the bad part of the trip, I should add that I was helped a lot by Jordi, a local guide who also helped me get the bus from Mekele to Lalibela four days earlier, and through all his help never got a commission nor asked for a tip (I gave him one at the end anyway).
The good part of the trip began about half an hour after I arrived in Gashena. Along with Taka and Masae, the lovely Japanese couple I'd been squeezed next to on the earlier overpriced minibus, I hitched a ride in a super-comfy 4x4, carrying four guys from Addis who work for an agricultural insurance firm that offers insurance for smallholder farmers using a system that's closely related to microfinance. They'd been assessing risk indexes in the farmland around Lalibela (and seeing Lalibela's churches for the first time in their lives), and were heading back to Bahir Dar for some more meetings. Not only did they do the reverse of gouge us on the price--I thought I'd agreed to a slightly-inflated-but-totally-fair-for-4x4-comfort 200 birr, but at the end of the trip the driver insisted I pay only 150 birr--but they also went out of their way to help Taka and Masae, who were trying to get to Gonder, which is in the opposite direction from Bahir Dar after the junction town of Werota. After dropping Taka and Masae at the Werota bus station, the Ethiopians refused to leave until they were sure that Taka and Masae were on a bus, they assisted in negotiations, and insisted on driving them to Bahir Dar when it was clear that they couldn't get a fair price in Werota. They also spoke excellent English and made for fascinating conversation. Not only did I have a long chat about Ethiopian politics, and the disappointment of the rigged 2005 election, but I also had the lyrics to a number of Teddy Afro songs explained to me. Teddy Afro is Ethiopia's most popular singer, and you hear his music absolutely everywhere, including our 4x4. A rather cheesy ballad took on rather touching significance when I learned that it was a love song where the singer mourns his separation from his Eritrean lover. With none-too-subtle political overtones, the song wishes for peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea so that the singer can be reunited with his lover. Teddy Afro has been imprisoned in the past on what are generally thought to be trumped-up charges for taking stances critical of the ruling political party.
But at this point you're probably thinking, "what about those three days in Lalibela? What was that about Lalibela being Ethiopia's premier tourist destination?" If you're like me before I read my Ethiopia travel book, you may never have even heard of Lalibela. If it were in Egypt or Jordan instead of Ethiopia, it would be (nearly) as famous as the Pyramids or Petra. But because it's in Ethiopia, it's largely escaped the notice of the wider world (although that said, it was the only place I've been in Ethiopia where you really did pass a white person every five minutes). But, to cut to the chase, Lalibela was Ethiopia's capital during the Zagwe dynasty from roughly the 10th to 13th centuries, and is named for its most famous king, who, during the 12th century (clear enough on dates, Eddie?), oversaw the construction of eleven churches dug out of the rock.
By "dug out of the rock," what I mean is that, over about 24 years, 40,000 labourers dug into the red volcanic rock and carved ornate monolithic and semi-monolithic churches whose roofs stand at ground level, and whose foundations lie ten or more metres down below. The sight is truly awesome to behold, even if all but one of the churches is now covered by hyper-modern white roofing supplied by the European Union to protect them from centuries of erosion. The roofing doesn't quite manage the ironic elegance of I. M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre, but I suppose it's better than letting the churches crumble.
The churches stand in three clusters. The northwest cluster is the most impressive, featuring Bet Medhane Alem, which, at 11.5m in height and 800 square metres in area, is the largest monolithic rock-hewn church in the world, as well as the smaller Bet Maryam, with a breathtakingly elaborate interior. I had to keep reminding myself that these structures were dug straight out of the rock. Bet Medhane Alem has the dimensions of a sizeable church, and the only difference between its pillars and the ones in a normal stone church is that there are no fissures where stone slabs were placed on top of one another because the whole church is one single massive piece of rock. Especially because the white roofing prevents any distance shots, the whole thing has to be seen to be believed.
The southeast cluster is a little more scattered, with long tunnels and winding passages leading between churches, making me think that the eight-year-old me who thrilled at exploring the ruined castles of the Welsh border would have been in seventh heaven racing around between these churches. And even the adult me kind of wished he had nieces and nephews here with whom he could play the world's greatest game of hide-and-go-seek.
Separate from the two other clusters, Bet Giyorgis stands on its own, and is probably the picture you'll see if you do a google image search of Lalibela, because it's the only one of the churches that isn't covered in roofing (yup: just checked). It's also sublimely beautiful in its cruciform shape, even if the interior is a little disappointing.
I swear, the person who's missed out the most in not knowing more about Ethiopia is Steven Spielberg. This place would have been perfect for an Indiana Jones film. Wandering about the churches yesterday with a Dutch couple, we started plotting out the whole thing. Pre-WWII Ethiopia occupied by Italian fascists--who naturally need a few Nazi advisors to give Indy someone to clash wits with--the real location of the Ark of the Covenant at stake, not to mention an ancient Christian culture with its own mysterious rites and dark secrets: the film really just writes itself.
My first visit to the churches at Lalibela couldn't have been better. I'd arrived late afternoon from Mekele following a route that didn't go by the churches, so I hadn't seen them when I arrived. That evening I met an English couple halfway through a Cape-to-Cairo motorbike trip (I really like English people) who were getting a guided tour of the churches the following day and had been invited by their guide to drop in at a pre-dawn ceremony at Bet Meskel, one of the smaller churches in the northwest cluster. They offered to let me join their tour, starting with the ceremony.
Each one of the churches has particular associations that make different days sacred for different churches. Each church has a special ceremony about once a month, where the priests stay up all night chanting and praying, and last Thursday night was Bet Meskel's special night. So after getting up before 5 the previous day to catch an early bus from Mekele, I got up before 5 again on Friday morning so that I could catch the last hour of the ceremony before the priests went off to bed at dawn. When Anna, Kristian, and I arrived, it was still dark, so my first view of the churches was of these shadowy masses looming up from down below me. Without any proper orientation as to where I was, I descended into the rock, passed through a tunnel, and found myself in a smallish square on the outside of a circle of about twenty priests, all clad head to toe in white, swaying back and forth and chanting in Ge'ez, accompanied only by a drum and these metal rattle-like things that they'd shake for a kind of tambourine effect. I've never been so glad that my camera has a video function. Gradually, the dawn light seeped through the blackness, and the rocks around me changed from a shadowy grey to dark reddish brown to increasingly paler reddish brown. By a bit after 6, it was unmistakably day, and the drumming and chanting climaxed and calmed down, and people slowly filed into Bet Meskel or off to wherever they were going to sleep.
Not only are the churches of Lalibela astonishing monuments of a long-dead dynasty, they're also very much living temples of Christian worship. In case Spielberg needed further incentive.
After heading back to the hotel for breakfast, Kristian, Anna, and I rejoined our guide, Agiew, who gave us the official tour of the churches. To be frank, the tour was a bit disappointing, but the churches themselves weren't, and since I'd given myself three days in Lalibela (and since the $20 (!!!) admission ticket is good for five days), I was able to come back yesterday and tour around a bit by myself and a bit with the fun Dutch couple that was staying in my hotel and who I ran into halfway through my day at the churches.
The churches in Lalibela are definitely the town's highlight, but they aren't the only churches in the area. On Saturday, I spent the morning hiking up to Asheton Maryam, a church up a mountain overlooking the town. Lalibela itself is at a cool 2600m above sea level, and Asheton Maryam must have been at least another 500m higher. The church itself was nothing compared to the ones in town, but the hike was lovely--barring the fact that I was followed almost the entire way by prospective guides and pestering children ("Hello pen!" "Hello money!" I seriously worry about the future of a country where it seems 90% of the children grow up thinking it's normal and acceptable to ask foreigners to give them things for no reason at all.) A steep climb up beyond the church took me to a beautiful small plateau overlooking the town and much of the surrounding countryside. I could happily have spent an hour up there relaxing if I hadn't forgot to bring a hat to protect me from the midday sun and if I hadn't been joined by a young man who'd appeared from seemingly nowhere and was slowly working his way toward asking me to give him money.
On the way up to Asheton Maryam, I passed crowds of villagers coming down the same road, with donkeys loaded with goods. Saturday is Lalibela's market day, and the Lalibela market is deservedly famous, drawing in people from the surrounding villages, many of them making several hours' journey to buy, sell, and trade. It was great fun wandering about the stalls, which were selling everything from clothes to food (I finally got to see the tef grain from which injera is made) to (my personal highlight) flip-flops for farmers made out of used car tires.
And what does one do on a Saturday night in this holiest of Ethiopian cities? Why, one watches the Champions League Final, of course. Ethiopians are soccer-crazy, and it's all over TV screens, so the most important club-level match of the year was a must-see. I was also with Till and Wilma, who aren't great soccer fans, but felt they had to go out and support Bayern Munich, who were unlikely finalists against Chelsea. For my own part, and despite being almost entirely ignorant about soccer, I was on Bayern's side partly because Franck Ribery is sublime (and Robben and Schweinsteiger are pretty great too) and partly because I object in principle to teams like Chelsea and Manchester City that are effectively the playthings of billionaire owners.
Till, Wilma, and I found our way to a small cafe/bar that had been converted into a viewing area, with loads of chairs and a big-by-Ethiopian-standards screen set up at the far end. We were the only Westerners in a crowd of about 80 Ethiopians, and judging from the cheers, I'd say that they were at least 90% Chelsea partisans. This has mostly to do with the unhealthy respect Ethiopians seem to have for the English Premiership. Of the conversation-openers I meet with in my walks around Ethiopian cities, one of my favourites is "what is your favourite team in the English Premiership?" It's one of my favourites because it seems to me to be the one that most genuinely reaches out to try to form a friendship. Questions like "What is your country?" inevitably reinforce a sense of distance between the questioner and the answerer, but who your favourite football club is can genuinely create a sense of fellowship. More's the pity, then, that I know far too little about English club football to bond over this question. "I'm more into ice hockey" usually draws blank stares and only serves to reinforce whatever distance there already was between us (I was trying to guess where the nearest ice rink is, and figure it's probably in Dubai or Israel), but I really can't honestly claim to have a favourite club. The only clubs where I know the names of more than two players are clubs like Chelsea, which I object to for reasons mentioned above, or Manchester United, which is more a massively successful marketing phenomenon than a sports team. So, sadly, I end up struggling a bit in football conversations with Ethiopians, especially since they all seem to have encyclopedic knowledge of all things football-related.
A secondary reason for Chelsea's popularity on this occasion (it seems Manchester United is generally the runaway favourite) is that their star striker, Didier Drogba, is a fellow African. Seeing the delight in the crowd as Drogba scored the equalizing goal in the 88th minute and then the winning penalty in the shootout (a further injustice is that Bayern overwhelmingly outplayed Chelsea and didn't deserve to lose), it struck me how remarkable pan-African pride is. Ethiopia and Drogba's Ivory Coast have next to nothing--geographically, ethnically, historically, linguistically, culturally--in common, but because Drogba's African, he's still a hero. Imagine a Spaniard cheering on a Polish athlete because he's European. It just wouldn't happen.
And that pretty much brings me to the end of this rather long post. But since I'm heading back to the big bad city of Addis Ababa tomorrow, I should say a few quick words in praise of donkeys, who I'll probably be seeing less of in Addis. In the course I taught this spring, I required students to give group presentations on different animals of their choice, where they discuss the biology, human uses, cultural significance, etc., of an animal of their choice. One of the best of the bunch was a presentation on donkeys, which brought out their importance to third-world economies, as well as giving an insightful treatment of their symbolic role as humble beasts of burden (as well as stupid asses). Donkeys are everywhere in Ethiopia, and the respect that I first learned from my students has developed into a deep love. They're remarkably strong for their small size, incredibly hard working, and gentle creatures to boot. Jase described them as broken-spirited, which I suppose is true, but in them I see (what may amount to the same thing) a spirit of resignation. Resignation to one's fate, to the fact that life is hard but must be endured, is central to every religion, and I couldn't help but see in the gentle resignation of donkeys a truly spiritual genius. This might sound like the worst kind of anthropomorphism, but donkeys strike me as quintessentially religious animals. And thinking in that vein gives a new perspective on the significance of Christ's riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Certainly, being in a country that relies so heavily on their labour gives me a deeper understanding of the symbolic significance of donkeys in Western literature.
Kings ride donkeys in the Old Testament, too. They have a royal association. On a practical level, I suspect that horses were less plentiful in Israel than in the neighboring empires. Wikipedia says that in antiquity a Near Eastern king rode a horse in war and a donkey in peace. That makes sense, but these days I have my doubts about anything wikipedia says. Your trip sounds great! I can't wait to see the pictures.
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