“They're just six hours off!” she explained. “When it's really six o'clock am, they say it's noon. And when it's seven, they say it's one! So crazy!” She was a 39-year old Chicago social worker, in town to visit an Ethiopian baby that she was adopting. I thought hard about trying to explain to her the way time zones worked, but thought better of it.
It's a good thing, because she was actually right. Ethiopia is just different. They have noon in the morning, when the sun rises. It makes sense, I guess. They also have rejected the pan-African diet of maize meal and tasteless relish in favor of a splendid, flavorful national cuisine. This also makes sense.
They also spent twenty years as a communist dictatorship in the finest Soviet tradition, which I suppose makes less sense. Those years, after the overthrow of the Emperor Haile Selassie by a certain Colonel Mengistu laid the foundation for Ethiopia to become one of Africa's poorest and most backward states, despite it's rich cultural traditions and splendidly proud people.
Ethiopia emerged into something resembling a modern democracy in 1991, but the capital, Addis Ababa, from where I write this, is still a mess. It has none of the modicrum of order that most sub-Saharan cities have held over from their colonial eras, and none of the entrepreneurial bustle of West Africa. It does have a tremendous number of people, probably close to 8 million. The roads are in dismal condition, but packed with blue-and-white Toyota Hiace minibuses and remarkably well preserved Soviet Lada taxicabs.
Ethiopia is in what I call the “crappy-mall” stage of development. I spent the day in one such taxi, navigating the traffic between the underwhelming tourist attractions. By lunchtime, I had covered them all, and was ready to indulge in what I often like to do in bearded third-world countries: get a shave. I did so in what my guide (actually the manager of the restaurant I ate in last night) called the best shopping center in Addis. The Sunshine center, pictured here, was four floors of 10-20m2 shops, most of which specialized in what I would call “general trading”, selling just about anything. This sort of retail is a step up from the “open market” stage of development, but far, far behind the other African capitals I saw on this trip, which are into the “branded supermarket” stage, and decades behind the “luxury mall” states of the Arabian Gulf, just across the Red Sea from here. The mall reminded me most of Suntec City, the disused mall in Kuala Lumpor converted to a bootleg DVD market. I used to frequent it while working there.
About four pm the heavens opened, and as the Lada's windshield wipers were not working, we were sidelined and headed into drug den. I'm referring, of course, to a high-end qat parlor – a dispensary of the Horn of Africa's national narcotic. Qat is a leaf of some sort which, when chewed, releases a mild stimulant into the user's body. The effect is so mild as to be difficult to describe, but in small doses it appears to facilitate conversation and alertness. Strictly empirical observation suggests that in larger doses it makes you stoned – or at least that's what I could gather from the scores of shop boys and drivers I saw lazying behind counters and steering wheels, slack-jawed, unresponsive, and red-eyed.
My self-appointed guide for the day was Negash, the 25 year-old manager of the restaurant in the hotel I stayed in. I met him at dinner last night, and we chatted a bit. He is a former tourist guide, putting himself through business college so that he might capitalize upon what he sees as Ethiopia's coming tourist boom. He correctly points out that while there exists all the requirements for a vibrant tourism industry (the aforementioned excellent international flight connections chief among them), the extant infrastructure is miserable. Case in point: King's Hotel where he works, despite being Addis' 3rd best hotel and the primary crashpad for the neighboring African Union (AU) headquarters, is terrible. The room I stayed in was literally crumbling, and smelled of socks (though, to be fair, so did St George Cathedral). The most telling evidence of Ethiopia's backwardness is the essentially total absence of Internet cafes. There was one photocopy shop which had a few terminals, but there was a long line and I didn't bother. It is exactly as Lusaka, Zambia was in 1998 during my first visit.
The Chinese are rapidly re-building Addis' road network, and of course, it's soccer stadium (the Chinese have built a soccer stadium in every African capital I have visited, including Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso). A Five-star hotel, paid for by Gulf investors, is being built across the street, to serve the needs of the AU dignitaries. It's possible that Negash is right, and if he is I will certainly come back to see the many sites that he describes in Ethiopia's hinterland.
But for now, I will merely enjoy his food. I'm in the restaurant now, listening to a large sequined woman belt out a truly awful rendition of "If Loving You is Wrong." I'm about to close my laptop and call him over to see about ordering one last Ethiopian meal before I head to the airport to catch my Addis-Bangkok shuttle. There are two flights on that route each day. Can't wait to see who's on it.
(Note to anyone headed to Ethiopia: call Negash on +251 911 14 21 03 or +251 913 30 6 35 and he will sort you out. Tell him Mr. Ben sent you.)
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