Ferenge Addis Blog

Repatriating--Washington to Raleigh

When I finally got through passport control in Washington Dulles airport, I found my bags sitting on the floor in front of the belt. I sought the help of a bored-looking Skycap (baggage helper) named Duane about finding the pets. I told him I needed his help getting all my luggage and pets out of the airport (it's normal to tip these guys well, so he was motivated to help). So he threw my bags on his big cart, then went looking for Toby (dog) and Janet (cat). The KLM lady pointed to the other end of the luggage hall, and there they were, Janet's crate sitting on top of Toby's. As we got closer I couldn't see either pet, but when I said "Toby" his head popped up and he looked right at me. A quick look in Janet's cage confirmed she was okay.

We got in a Customs line and I got the pet travel documents ready; Duane and I were both sure we would be funneled into the longer-inspection line. None of it: the customs agent gave a cursory glance at the pets' health certificates and rabies vaccination records. I'm not sure he even looked in the crates. I might have had a Gelada Baboon in the big one and I don't think he would have noticed. I bribed Duane with a promise of a big tip and asked him to keep the pets while I went to get the rental car. A quick ride in the Thrifty shuttle and I was livin' large in my Dodge Magnum station wagon. I found my way back to the arrivals doors and we slid the crates right in the back of the car. I overtipped the Duane and after a brief stop to let Toby relieve himself we headed down the parkway towards the beltway and Friday rush hour traffic.

I stopped at a Safeway store neat Woodbridge Va and got the pets some food, water, and got Janet a temporary litter pan. I let them loose in the car, and kept heading south. Somewhere south of Richmond my eyes started to droop, and I had to stop at a rest area for a quick nap. So, at about 1:30 a.m. we arrived and M&M's house, promptly woke up the neighborhood with their dogs and Toby's barking, and by 2:00 we were all back sound asleep, safe, for our first night back in this strange country.

all three safe and sound

Toby (dog), Janet (cat), and I are all safe and sound, living for a week with my friends M and M in Raleigh. (Thanks everyone for the well-wishing e-mails.) Yesterday we cruised from DC in the left-pictured fat American uber-wagon. Hah!

More soon as the jetlag dissipates...

ADD-AMS culture shock

The pets and I made it onto our KLM flight to Amsterdam with no problem. Mesfin has a friend at the airport, so he helped smooth the pet loading. I'm writing from a coffee shop in the Amsterdam airport, and the pets are resting at the animal hotel.

Schipol airport is a real culture shock: everything is modern, clean, sparkling, and efficient. Shops hold every very-latest gadget and sparkly thing. Clothing shops are full of designer names: Izod, Ferragamo, Hugo Boss ($200 blue jeans), Chanel, etc. At the restaurants, there is about 1/3 the staff of a typical Addis restaurant. The help seems highly efficient, and not very happy or friendly. And the prices are damned expensive: $9 latte, $23 toast-eggs-and-juice breakfast. In Addis the whole thing would have cost $3. In the boonies it would have cost $0.95. Of course, spending dollars here only makes things worse. It seems the only currency as weak as the dollar is the Birr. The last I knew it was holding steady at 9.2/$. It now costs $1.47 to buy one Euro.

Oh, and of course it was lovely surfing the 'net on blazingly-fast, uncensored wifi.

Repatriating with pets: how it works

As it turns out, repatriating your pets is in some ways easier than repatriating yourself. Take my example. For a one-way cattle-car-class ticket from Addis to Washington I paid $1300. Because the tiny seats don't have enough leg room for full-sized people and don't recline more than a few degrees, I'll be lucky if I get a couple of hours of sleep out of the whole journey. I have an eight-hour layover in Amsterdam. Since I'm on an economy class ticket, I don't get use of the airline lounges. So I can roam around the crowded waiting rooms, cooling my heels until my flight boards.

Compare this to Toby (dog) and Janet's (cat) experience. They go as excess baggage, $150 each. They go in their crates with soft blankets in the bottom, in which they can curl up, stretch out, lie flat, and sleep. In Amsterdam, KLM collects them and takes them to the pet hotel where they can exercise, snack, and relax until they go to the next flight, all included in the $150. No word on whether they get a massage and spa treatment.

My top six restaurants in Addis

1. Serenade: No question the best menu, service, and atmosphere in Addis. It's not that easy to find, tucked back in a neighborhood near amest kilo. The decor is deep-hued modern with several small dining rooms, which cuts down on noise. The chef combines cuisines from all over the world: european, middle-eastern, african (including Ethiopian) for unique dishes. The desert cart is a sweet-lover's dream. And the unique ice cream flavors have to be tasted to be believed. (My favorite is cardamon/saffron.)

2. Casteli's: now that the owner is concentrating full-time again on the restaurant, Casteli's food is back to it's former top quality. In an old Armenian building in Piazza, the restaurant has perfect traditional Italian decor: white walls, starched linen tablecloths, polished wood floors. The service is excellent and unhurried. The menu is traditional multi-course Italian. I recommend the cold antipasti bar. While I usually stick to the home-made pasta, people who have accompanied me also liked the meat dishes, with the lamb shanks being a standout. The wine list is short, but well-chosen. There are no wines by the glass. They offer one small-bottle of Merlot which is passable. Be sure to make a reservation no matter what. The owner sits on a throne-like raised chair behind a desk and scowls comically at those who attempt to enter without one, regardless of the number of empty tables. A few words of Italian have been known to soften his heart.

3. Jewel of India: located in a villa on Meskel Flower Rd. just a couple of blocks from Dembel, Jewel of India is my new favorite Indian in Addis. KP recommended it when I suggested Sangham, and I'm glad she did. The atmosphere is intimate, with just two small dining rooms (the former dining and living rooms of the villa). The service is attentive but not hovering. The huge menu offers something for everyone, and the hardest part is making a choice. The standout appetizer is the chili paneer, spicy without being overbearing.

4. Amsterdam Cafe: for my money, this large restaurant located at the end of Bole Rd. has the best pizza in Addis, a claim I'm sure will raise debate. The crust is always crunchy and the sauces flavorful. The simple gorgonzola pizza is spiced well enough that even with only the cheese as the main ingredient, I never tire of it. The veggie pizza is loaded with fresh local vegetables and is another standout. They offer a full menu, so if your fellow-diners want pasta or Ethiopian food, they'll be accomodated. The service at Amsterdam is friendly, but very slow. Don't go if you're in a hurry.

5. Makush: run by an Italian chef, Makush combines an art gallery with a restaurant. In what might be called the lobby of the restaurant there are hundreds of paintings on display and available for browsing, in stacks. The works are also featured on the walls of the restaurant proper. Makush offers a semi-traditional Italian menu, with some modern flair thrown in. My favorites are the spinach salad, the best in Addis, and any pasta with the red gorgonzola sauce. The wine list is very short, but adequate.

6. Yod Abyssinia: in my opinion the best "cultural restaurant" in town. I go there every time I have visitors from the US. They have a buffet as well as a full menu. There is a traditional coffee ceremony to add the proper ambiance, and the service is good and the waitstaff plentiful. The entertainment is wonderful, and on Saturday nights seems to go on all night. Be sure to make reservations. By 7:30 on weekends the restaurant is full. (A well-applied 50-Birr note usually makes an empty table appear as if by magic.) During the singing and dancing show it's not uncommon for the audience to start participating, especially later in the evening as the beer flows. It's a convivial, friendly atmosphere, with more locals than ferenges.

Wifi review: the Swiss Cafe, Lime Tree, Kaldis

As I reported earlier, there's a nice trend emerging at Bole coffee shops: free wifi. Here's my entirely unscientific poll of how it works at three places that offer it.

• Lime tree: I've tried five times. It has worked once, at very slow dial-up speeds.
• Kaldi's (the one on Bole Rd. and the one by the big church). They say they offer it, but I've asked many times and not once have found it working.
• Swiss Cafe: good, but weird. It's always been working when I was there. And it can be really fast, with bursts of speed up to 500kbps (Stop snickering you North American types, that's really fast for Erthiopia!) But every few minutes it drops out for about a minute. This is no problem if you're just surfing or checking e-mail. If you're trying to download software updates, as I was, it just won't work.

What about other folks, any other places offering wireless? How does it work?

The cow in my bedroom

How did this cow get in my bedroom??? Who is torturing it and why???

These were the thoughts in my panicked mind when I was jolted out of sleep at (get this) 2:45 a.m. with the window-pane-rattling-volume bellowing from the church 1km away. I guess today is Timkat, and the priest thought everyone should be up, and everyone would love the sound of his voice as much as he does.

This brings up some funny questions: Is god deaf, so you have to amplify so he will hear your prayers? Are there people who would love to come to church at 2:45 a.m. but they can't quite make it, so prayers will be blasted city-wide as a public service? Are there people who don't worship your god but if only they could hear your wonderful preaching at 2:45 the scales would fall from their eyes and they would be converted? Did it not occur to the priest that perhaps there might be one citizen in the city of several million who would prefer to sleep during normal sleeping time for humans? Does the loudest priest in the city win the cool-priest contest?

Look, one of the things I love about Ethiopia is its religious tolerance. I support this 100% If you want to worship God, Allah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Krishna, Thor, or little green space aliens, more power to you. But how does religious tolerance jive with the populace's right to a decent night's sleep?

US Customs: what you can't take back

As I said in an earlier entry, it's a lot easier to get one's household effects (HHE) back into the US than to get them into Ethiopia in the first place. Coming in to Ethiopia, GOE Customs is super-worried you will being in things to sell for which they won't get their 100% customs duty. So the US embassy has to get involved, things sit in customs for a long time, lots of forms get stamped in triplicate by many many agencies, etc.

For a returning US citizen, things are a bit easier. Mainly US Customs is worried about you not bringing in "biohazards." This means food. No kidding. Any food you want to bring in has to be declared, inspected, and will hold up your shipment by days or weeks. This includes things you would expect, like plants, meat, fruit, etc. But it also includes all packaged food, like peanut butter, canned soup, pet food, etc. Huh? These precautions are made stranger still because you can bring all these things in your checked baggage. So if I pack some good Tomoca Harar in my luggage, good deal. If I put some in my air freight shipment, we all descend into the white-man's hell of US Government beuracracy. Why the difference? I know airports are logic-free zones, and US government regulations are all about process and have nothing to do with effect, but this one seems especially strange.

Repatriating your stuff: what it's like

Moving back to the US is almost as big a production as moving here. The physical logistics are the same: you make four big piles of stuff: sea freight, air freight, carry-on, and checked baggage. This time the pets count as checked baggage, and only cost about $150 each. (Although Janet demanded an upgrade to Business Class, none was available.) I'm flying to Washington DC, the closest I can get to NC with only one layover. (I want to minimize the time in the crates for the critters.) I'll rent a car in DC and drive the 4-6 hours to Raleigh.

Air freight timing is, shall we say, variable. On the way here I was quoted 8-10 days. It took 28 days. Oops. Sea freight always takes about 2-3 months. This timing is good for me. By the time the air freight gets to the US I will be in a sublet in DC. By the time the sea freight arrives, I should be in my permanent residence.

Customs is *much* easier going back to the US. As a US citizen mostly they're just worried whether I'm bringing back "biohazards." This includes things like peanut butter. No kidding. No food can come back.

Good Bye Ethiopia

In three days the movers will come and pack up my stuff. Two days later, Toby, Janet, and I will get on a plane and head for the US via Amsterdam. After spending some time with friends in North Carolina, I'm starting a new job in the Washington DC area.

I plan to continue this blog for a couple of weeks after getting back, to write about the culture shock of being a US resident again. Also, people who are coming here to live might be interested in what the repatriation process is like. By the time I'm back in the US for a couple of weeks I might also have some perspective on what my 16 months here has meant. I may also start a blog about what it's like to be a foreigner (from NC) living in DC.

So, to Sami and the rest of the "Ferenge go home" crowd: thanks for providing the most entertaining comments on this blog, and now you get your wish.