I'm now in Oxford, staying with my aunt and uncle (and joined by my parents!). I slept two hours on the night of the 3rd before heading out to the airport for a middle-of-the-night flight that took me via Cairo to Heathrow. I felt wretched all day, couldn't keep my eyes open by 9pm, and zonked out only to open my eyes and look at the clock and see it was already 10am. I clearly needed a bit of sleep.
Being in England isn't as strange as I thought it might be. There have been a few moments of surprised recognition over the past 24 hours--just how green the landscape is, the fact that highways have multiple lanes, the absence of trash and livestock everywhere, the fact that I can eat fresh fruit and vegetables without worrying about the water it's been washed in, etc.--but nothing like the disorientation I remember feeling upon returning from India or Russia. I suppose those trips lasted longer, and I was younger. It's nice to be able to switch worlds without too much shock, although that shock also represented a greater readiness to find my ordinary world strange. I wouldn't want to think that I'm now so set in my ways that nothing surprises me.
Oh, and a month in Ethiopia's also done something to my lungs. I visited my grandmother this afternoon and decided to run some of the way back. After a month where I was more than 2000m above sea level for a good chunk of the time, I found I caught my breath after just one or two pants. I should have signed up for a marathon for when I got back down to sea level.
I don't have a whole lot to recount from my last few days in Ethiopia. I last updated the blog in Harar on the evening of the 1st. On the 2nd, I had an early start to take a 12-hour Selam Bus journey from Harar back to Addis Ababa, which was mostly uneventful. I had a brief and interesting conversation with a guy sitting opposite from me who does research in agricultural economics and was on his way to a conference in Arba Minch, the town that would have been next on my list of places to visit if I'd had a few more days in Ethiopia. He worked on the economics of rose nurseries, and showed me a copy of his print-on-demand (at €70 a pop!) book outlining his research on rose horticulture in southern and eastern Ethiopia. It was one of those interesting conversations where I learned all sorts of things on a topic it had never occurred to me to think about before. For instance, the world's three largest producers of roses are Kenya, Colombia, and Ecuador, where they're grown and then shipped in massive quantities via airplane (roses wither too fast to be shipped slowly) mostly to Europe. The Netherlands has the world's largest horticultural market, and roses there are sold at auction to the various florists of the West. The growers in Africa and South America (and Israel, which is another major rose producer, and a great innovator when it comes to efficiency with water use) have agents in the Netherlands who do the selling for them, and they only find out what their roses have fetched after the auction. Ethiopia has the right climate for roses, and has certain advantages over European rose-growers in not needing expensive greenhouse technology and having cheap labour, so there's good reason to hope that roses will be a growing export industry for Ethiopia in the future.
I effectively had one day in Addis, and decided to take it pretty easy. There was nothing I was itching to see or do (with one exception, which I'll get to shortly), so I decided to spend the day relaxing, reading, and writing at the Taitu Hotel, which has a pleasant and quiet patio space. As it happened, being a solitary traveller in a hotel that sees a lot of tourist traffic, I did far less reading and writing than I'd planned. I was approached early in the day by Toby and Rory, two-thirds of a set of public-school-educated British triplets (I didn't ask which, but they'd mentioned Berkshire, so it could well have been Eton--Toby and I also overlapped for a year at Oxford) who'd just arrived in Ethiopia for a two-week visit where the main priority was a trek in the Simiens. Toby first approached me as I finished breakfast, looking for some tips on what to see in Addis, but we got on well enough that we spent a good chunk of the day chatting. I also wound up having lunch with a group of UN interns that I'd met briefly in Harar. And I also did a bit of reading and writing.
When I last saw Samuel, I told him I wanted to have a proper Ethiopian meal on my last night in Ethiopia, and he more than delivered on that request. Joined by his brother Getachew, the three of us went to 2000 Habesha, a "cultural restaurant," which is one of Addis's hot spots. The place feels a bit kitschy, done up with every cliché in the Ethiopian book, although the Ethiopians in the crowd far outnumbered the non-Ethiopians. It was certainly a different class of Ethiopian than I was used to, all very dressed-up, well-to-do, and self-important, and Samuel explained that a significant number were probably expatriates back in Addis for a visit. What made 2000 Habesha particularly special was the stage show they had to entertain us (this was the "cultural" part of the "cultural restaurant"). Musicians, singers, and dancers gave a string of performances from various parts of Ethiopia, ranging from the Gurage in the south to the Tigraians in the north. Most impressive was that the band--and the singers and dancers to some extent--was the same throughout the show, meaning that they'd achieved a high level of competence (I'm obviously in no position to judge just how high) in a wide range of performance styles. One thing that Ethiopians repeatedly emphasize, and with justifiable pride, is that Ethiopia is home to over 80 distinct ethnic groups--not to mention sizeable numbers of Christians and Muslims--and that they all live peacefully side by side. Compare that with Somalia/Puntland/Somaliland, which is/are the only country/ies in Africa to be linguistically and ethnically homogenous, and yet where people notoriously do not live peacefully side by side a lot of the time.
Anyway, the performances were great. All very lively, and with a great sense of humour: at one point they staged a Gurage wedding where a Swedish woman was dragged on to the stage and interviewed about her husband, while being fed answers in a language she clearly didn't understand (fortunately I had Samuel on hand to translate for me). And I can reiterate what I first learned at the Asmari Bet in Bahir Dar toward the beginning of my travels: Amharic dancing is incredibly sexy. Sexy, but, unlike Turkish belly-dancing or Latin American dance or what passes for dancing in Western clubs, not overtly sexual or seductive. Don't get me wrong, this wasn't morris dancing: I was watching sexual beings, not anthropomorphic shrubbery. But what made the woman sexy wasn't the jiggling of luscious body parts, but rather the vigorous way in which her whole body was alive in the dance. It was as if this person came alive to dance, and that while she danced she was more alive than I ever am. And she looked damn good doing it.
Also, the food was great. Alongside the sublime Habesha Kitfo in Gonder, it was probably the best food I've had in Ethiopia (that both restaurants have "Habesha" in their name becomes less of a coincidence when you bear in mind that "Habesha" is Amharic for "Ethiopian"). And this seems a good moment to say a few words in praise of Ethiopian food. The mainstay of Ethiopian cuisine is injera, a spongy flatbread laid out pancake-style, upon which are dumped various curried meats, stewed vegetables, and sauces. The diner then tears off bits of injera and uses them to pick up the toppings and eat them together. First of all, injera itself is very tasty, even if a bit sour, and highly nutritious: it's made from a grain called tef, which grows only in the Ethiopian highlands, and is unusually high in protein and minerals (it's also fine for the gluten intolerant in case that applies to you). Second of all, the sauces that come with the injera are super tasty. My favourite was shiro, a red chick pea paste that's perfectly spiced and has a wonderfully creamy consistency. Which brings up the third point, which is that Ethiopian cuisine is very vegetarian friendly. I had to pass on some Ethiopian dishes that are apparently very nice, but I was hardly wanting for tasty meals. Not only are there great dishes like shiro tegabino and fata, but also Christian Ethiopia observes fasting days every Wednesday and Friday, where the whole country (or at least the Christian part) goes vegan, and you can order delicious fasting plates, which include shiro as well as a variety of stewed vegetables and roots on top of injera.
The one thing I'd say against injera is that it's very heavy, and I don't think I could happily consume more than one injera meal in a day. But fortunately that's just the beginning of the culinary story. Perhaps the one upside of Ethiopia's brief experience of Italian colonial administration (I couldn't help but wonder whether Somaliland's stability compared to the rest of Somalia was connected to the fact that Somaliland had formerly been under British colonial administration while the rest of Somalia was governed by the Italians) is that the main alternative to injera is pasta. And if Italian food isn't enough, there's also juice. "Juice" in Ethiopia is consumed with a spoon as often as not. It's a thick purée of various fruits (the lack of added water is a good thing, since tap water would have made me sick), such as mango, papaya, banana, and avocado, which is surprisingly good in juice form. You can also have some combination of various fruits: my favourite was a mango-avocado mix.
All of which is to say, I ate well in Ethiopia, especially on my last night. However, I'm also not sorry to be introducing a little more variety and fresh vegetables to my diet now that I'm back in England.
After the 2000 Habesha outing, I had a fond farewell with Samuel, with mutual and sincere expressions of hope that we'd cross paths again, and then headed back to my hotel for two hours of sleep before getting up at 1:30am for a 4:30am flight (I'd been told to leave for the airport three hours before my flight, but predictably spent about half of those three hours sitting bleary-eyed in a departure lounge). And now here I am in England.
Clouds had been getting thicker during my last week in Ethiopia, and on the last two days the heavens opened for the first time since my trek in the Simiens. Ethiopia's wet season has arrived. High time for me to get back to England. It never rains there.
Hopefully tomorrow I'll get a digest version of my photos up on facebook (I doubt many of you want to see all 600). I'm not sure if anyone reading this isn't on facebook, but I'll try to get an album up on Picasa as well just in case, and will post the link here when I do.
Being in England isn't as strange as I thought it might be. There have been a few moments of surprised recognition over the past 24 hours--just how green the landscape is, the fact that highways have multiple lanes, the absence of trash and livestock everywhere, the fact that I can eat fresh fruit and vegetables without worrying about the water it's been washed in, etc.--but nothing like the disorientation I remember feeling upon returning from India or Russia. I suppose those trips lasted longer, and I was younger. It's nice to be able to switch worlds without too much shock, although that shock also represented a greater readiness to find my ordinary world strange. I wouldn't want to think that I'm now so set in my ways that nothing surprises me.
Oh, and a month in Ethiopia's also done something to my lungs. I visited my grandmother this afternoon and decided to run some of the way back. After a month where I was more than 2000m above sea level for a good chunk of the time, I found I caught my breath after just one or two pants. I should have signed up for a marathon for when I got back down to sea level.
I don't have a whole lot to recount from my last few days in Ethiopia. I last updated the blog in Harar on the evening of the 1st. On the 2nd, I had an early start to take a 12-hour Selam Bus journey from Harar back to Addis Ababa, which was mostly uneventful. I had a brief and interesting conversation with a guy sitting opposite from me who does research in agricultural economics and was on his way to a conference in Arba Minch, the town that would have been next on my list of places to visit if I'd had a few more days in Ethiopia. He worked on the economics of rose nurseries, and showed me a copy of his print-on-demand (at €70 a pop!) book outlining his research on rose horticulture in southern and eastern Ethiopia. It was one of those interesting conversations where I learned all sorts of things on a topic it had never occurred to me to think about before. For instance, the world's three largest producers of roses are Kenya, Colombia, and Ecuador, where they're grown and then shipped in massive quantities via airplane (roses wither too fast to be shipped slowly) mostly to Europe. The Netherlands has the world's largest horticultural market, and roses there are sold at auction to the various florists of the West. The growers in Africa and South America (and Israel, which is another major rose producer, and a great innovator when it comes to efficiency with water use) have agents in the Netherlands who do the selling for them, and they only find out what their roses have fetched after the auction. Ethiopia has the right climate for roses, and has certain advantages over European rose-growers in not needing expensive greenhouse technology and having cheap labour, so there's good reason to hope that roses will be a growing export industry for Ethiopia in the future.
I effectively had one day in Addis, and decided to take it pretty easy. There was nothing I was itching to see or do (with one exception, which I'll get to shortly), so I decided to spend the day relaxing, reading, and writing at the Taitu Hotel, which has a pleasant and quiet patio space. As it happened, being a solitary traveller in a hotel that sees a lot of tourist traffic, I did far less reading and writing than I'd planned. I was approached early in the day by Toby and Rory, two-thirds of a set of public-school-educated British triplets (I didn't ask which, but they'd mentioned Berkshire, so it could well have been Eton--Toby and I also overlapped for a year at Oxford) who'd just arrived in Ethiopia for a two-week visit where the main priority was a trek in the Simiens. Toby first approached me as I finished breakfast, looking for some tips on what to see in Addis, but we got on well enough that we spent a good chunk of the day chatting. I also wound up having lunch with a group of UN interns that I'd met briefly in Harar. And I also did a bit of reading and writing.
When I last saw Samuel, I told him I wanted to have a proper Ethiopian meal on my last night in Ethiopia, and he more than delivered on that request. Joined by his brother Getachew, the three of us went to 2000 Habesha, a "cultural restaurant," which is one of Addis's hot spots. The place feels a bit kitschy, done up with every cliché in the Ethiopian book, although the Ethiopians in the crowd far outnumbered the non-Ethiopians. It was certainly a different class of Ethiopian than I was used to, all very dressed-up, well-to-do, and self-important, and Samuel explained that a significant number were probably expatriates back in Addis for a visit. What made 2000 Habesha particularly special was the stage show they had to entertain us (this was the "cultural" part of the "cultural restaurant"). Musicians, singers, and dancers gave a string of performances from various parts of Ethiopia, ranging from the Gurage in the south to the Tigraians in the north. Most impressive was that the band--and the singers and dancers to some extent--was the same throughout the show, meaning that they'd achieved a high level of competence (I'm obviously in no position to judge just how high) in a wide range of performance styles. One thing that Ethiopians repeatedly emphasize, and with justifiable pride, is that Ethiopia is home to over 80 distinct ethnic groups--not to mention sizeable numbers of Christians and Muslims--and that they all live peacefully side by side. Compare that with Somalia/Puntland/Somaliland, which is/are the only country/ies in Africa to be linguistically and ethnically homogenous, and yet where people notoriously do not live peacefully side by side a lot of the time.
Anyway, the performances were great. All very lively, and with a great sense of humour: at one point they staged a Gurage wedding where a Swedish woman was dragged on to the stage and interviewed about her husband, while being fed answers in a language she clearly didn't understand (fortunately I had Samuel on hand to translate for me). And I can reiterate what I first learned at the Asmari Bet in Bahir Dar toward the beginning of my travels: Amharic dancing is incredibly sexy. Sexy, but, unlike Turkish belly-dancing or Latin American dance or what passes for dancing in Western clubs, not overtly sexual or seductive. Don't get me wrong, this wasn't morris dancing: I was watching sexual beings, not anthropomorphic shrubbery. But what made the woman sexy wasn't the jiggling of luscious body parts, but rather the vigorous way in which her whole body was alive in the dance. It was as if this person came alive to dance, and that while she danced she was more alive than I ever am. And she looked damn good doing it.
Also, the food was great. Alongside the sublime Habesha Kitfo in Gonder, it was probably the best food I've had in Ethiopia (that both restaurants have "Habesha" in their name becomes less of a coincidence when you bear in mind that "Habesha" is Amharic for "Ethiopian"). And this seems a good moment to say a few words in praise of Ethiopian food. The mainstay of Ethiopian cuisine is injera, a spongy flatbread laid out pancake-style, upon which are dumped various curried meats, stewed vegetables, and sauces. The diner then tears off bits of injera and uses them to pick up the toppings and eat them together. First of all, injera itself is very tasty, even if a bit sour, and highly nutritious: it's made from a grain called tef, which grows only in the Ethiopian highlands, and is unusually high in protein and minerals (it's also fine for the gluten intolerant in case that applies to you). Second of all, the sauces that come with the injera are super tasty. My favourite was shiro, a red chick pea paste that's perfectly spiced and has a wonderfully creamy consistency. Which brings up the third point, which is that Ethiopian cuisine is very vegetarian friendly. I had to pass on some Ethiopian dishes that are apparently very nice, but I was hardly wanting for tasty meals. Not only are there great dishes like shiro tegabino and fata, but also Christian Ethiopia observes fasting days every Wednesday and Friday, where the whole country (or at least the Christian part) goes vegan, and you can order delicious fasting plates, which include shiro as well as a variety of stewed vegetables and roots on top of injera.
The one thing I'd say against injera is that it's very heavy, and I don't think I could happily consume more than one injera meal in a day. But fortunately that's just the beginning of the culinary story. Perhaps the one upside of Ethiopia's brief experience of Italian colonial administration (I couldn't help but wonder whether Somaliland's stability compared to the rest of Somalia was connected to the fact that Somaliland had formerly been under British colonial administration while the rest of Somalia was governed by the Italians) is that the main alternative to injera is pasta. And if Italian food isn't enough, there's also juice. "Juice" in Ethiopia is consumed with a spoon as often as not. It's a thick purée of various fruits (the lack of added water is a good thing, since tap water would have made me sick), such as mango, papaya, banana, and avocado, which is surprisingly good in juice form. You can also have some combination of various fruits: my favourite was a mango-avocado mix.
All of which is to say, I ate well in Ethiopia, especially on my last night. However, I'm also not sorry to be introducing a little more variety and fresh vegetables to my diet now that I'm back in England.
After the 2000 Habesha outing, I had a fond farewell with Samuel, with mutual and sincere expressions of hope that we'd cross paths again, and then headed back to my hotel for two hours of sleep before getting up at 1:30am for a 4:30am flight (I'd been told to leave for the airport three hours before my flight, but predictably spent about half of those three hours sitting bleary-eyed in a departure lounge). And now here I am in England.
Clouds had been getting thicker during my last week in Ethiopia, and on the last two days the heavens opened for the first time since my trek in the Simiens. Ethiopia's wet season has arrived. High time for me to get back to England. It never rains there.
Hopefully tomorrow I'll get a digest version of my photos up on facebook (I doubt many of you want to see all 600). I'm not sure if anyone reading this isn't on facebook, but I'll try to get an album up on Picasa as well just in case, and will post the link here when I do.
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