Popping out to the Middle East

I was a bit pre-mature with that last blog. I thought it was already September when I wrote it.

I entered Ethiopia with a tourist visa (on the advice of the Ethiopian Embassy in Nairobi). I can not get that converted to a work permit. I need a business visa. I can get the business visa from the Ethiopian Embassy in Melbourne (there isn't one in NZ so Melbourne deals with Kiwis and other Pacific islanders). They can issue the visa by post, but not if I am in Ethiopia at the time. So I need to leave the country, get an exit stamp in my passport, post it to Aus, wait a couple of weeks for them to process the visa send it back and return to Ethiopia with the correct visa.

I'm going to Yemen tomorrow to do that. It was the cheapest flight out of Ethiopia. I miss the huge millennium celebrations here but I get a paid trip to the Middle East. So I'm ok with that.

Last week Liam and I went up north. Great trip, long bus rides were made shorter by name-the-capital and call-my-bluff quiz games with two brit lads we met along the way. We are such geeks. We checked out monasteries, saw the source of the Blue Nile which would have been unremarkable if a hippo and her calf hadn’t popped their head out of the water near our boat... ok, about 100 metres away from out boat. I saw several huge lizards while waiting for the boys who were checking out a no-females-allowed monastery. We ate fresh fish, chewed chat, smoked shisha. We played a lot of cards and I cheated. I have had the same deck of plastic playing cards for a couple of months now so have started to recognise which ones are bent, scratched and damaged.

In one town a homeless guy approached Liam for money, Liam politely declined (in Arabic) the guy got more aggressive, spat on Liam then tried again for money. Liam this time responded with his version of the evil eye which kind of like he was trying to choose between rice of pasta for dinner. This time the homeless guy looked like he was going to pounce, spit and scratch Liam’s eyes out all at once. I pushed the guy back by his shoulders and he scampered away. So did we. He got ahead of us and grabbed Liam by his arm as we passed, he spat again while holding out his hand for money... I wonder if this technique of begging has worked for him in the past. He was last seen outside our hotel room with a brick in his hand. The hotel staff said that is was 'mad crazy man' and offered to kick him for us, we declined their offer.

On the 3rd day we headed to a place called Gondor (the landscape was more like the Shire. There we checked out huge castles build with the help of the Spanish and Portuguese. We fraternised with local hustlers, ate fancy Ethiopian food, and got bitten to pieces by bedbugs. Liam headed back to Sudan where he found many of his meager possessions had been stolen and his toilet broken. I returned to Addis.

So back in Addis my new flatmates have arrived, they are very cool. And the house was ready: well not totally ready. We didn't have a kitchen till yesterday and they are still sorting out things like hot water, curtains and keys. It kind of looks like we are squatting there. Another flatmate arrived yesterday. She's from India, grew up in Malaysia, educated in USA and worked in the Netherlands. I can't quite remember of pronounce her name just yet. We are a happy flat of 4.

Last week was school orientation. Very boring. School officially starts on the 17th of September. I will probably still be in Sana'a, Yemen then waiting for my passport. Next blog from my very first trip to the Middle East. Yay!