Musings while on my way from FRA to Ottawa ...

The flight itself from Addis to Frankfurt was OK, as mentioned in a previous post. While waiting to leave Addis, I went for a bite at the Satellite cafe and it was a nice send-off to Ethiopia. I got the menu right away then the servers appeared to be too busy chatting with one another, adjusting the TV, and sitting around doing nothing to take my order. I finally managed to make eye contact with one of them and ordered. After the burger arrived, I asked for some extra mustard, which sat held by one of the servers for a few minutes while she and 3 other staff chatted with someone at the counter about who knows what. Welcome to Ethiopia.

I watched Public Enemies on the screen on the Air Canada. It was good, but fed my fire about how we love to idolize criminals; I know my Sweet Thing will read this and tell me I'm too negative. Steven and Benita are picking me up at the airport and ST told me they are having people over tonight for the new year. I slept a third of the way on the ADD to FRA flight and hardly at all so far on my way to Ottawa.

I coined an expression in Ethiopia as I am well known for doing often ... "An Ethiopian moment". Here are the top Ethiopian moments in my 5 months in Addis:

1- Sitting at the cafeteria at MoFED one day, we are told they have no machiatto (their version of the lahte). We are unable to hear what we are being told since the milk frothing machine noise drowns out the server's voice. That same machine is the one that is supposedly not working, leading them to not be able to serve us what we want.

2- I ask what is for dinner at the Dulcian compound one day and since there is a tendency there to use too much salt on everything, I am told "salt" was made for dinner.

3- When at Select restaurant, I ask for a menu and am told they do not have one. I ask them to being me some food, and am asked "what kind?". Is that not why one has a menu?

4- I ask for mustard at a restaurant one day and they bring mayonnaise. So I ask for mayonnaise, and mustard arrives.

5- The coffee ladies are caught one day hiding cake and bombelino (a donut-like treat). Dr. Paul looks behind the counter of the cash register area and sees some of both.

6- Three, count them 3!! MoFED people enter my office and discuss a ruler that was in the office prior to my occupying it. Where has the ruler gone is the subject of the discussion and they decide to advise me not to leave any office accoutrements near the window as they may be stolen. That ruler discussion must have cost MoFED a few hundred birr for the time that these 3 people spent worrying about the delinquent ruler, probably valued at less than 50 birr.

7- A swarm of workers descend on the very steep lawn outside the Prime Minister's palace and proceed to mow the lawn with garden shears. I do applaud the environmentally friendly nature of the effort, and together they make the sound of a small helicopter.

8- There used to be a large hole near Meskel square with a few feet if water and a large amount of refuse floating in the aqua. One day they drain the hole somehow then proceed to start filling it with about 2-4 feet of dirt. Then they take the dirt out of the hole using a ramp of dirt concocted prior to the removal of the dirt JUST put there.

9- One always sees piles of dirt and the new holes that said dirt came out of all over Addis. I finally figured out why they dig a hole in Addis ... so they will have some dirt to fill up the hole they just dug.

10- Almost all of the vehicles in Addis are manual transmission. When they park said vehicles, they always put on the emergency brake and leave the transmission in gear. I have never seen a vehicle roll anywhere while in gear. This is similar to their habit of putting a rock behind one of the rear wheels when the vehicle is on an incline so it does not roll.

Don't get me wrong ... I love these people (habesha) and have a deep amount of respect for the way they do things. They are creative and inventive with the ways they do things not to mention how most of the labourious tasks we do in the west using fossil fuel burning equipment they do by hand in Ethiopia.

I will be making one final post to this BLOG but need to surf the web to ensure one of the words in that very short post is spelled correctly. This last post is crucial to the whole adventure and I do not want to mess it up.

I copied my BLOG into a Word document a while back and it occupies 186 pages at 13-point Garamond font, single spaced. I just wish there were some way in Googles blogger engine to sort the posts chronologically by ascending date of post. They are always sorted by descending date of post and there does not appear to be any way to do what I want.

This text was composed on my new MacBook and its text editor's spell checked flagged the word "Garamond" ... obviously this is not an industry standard font and must be some insidious invention of Apple's competition in the northwest corner of the state of Washington ...