Unimpressed by the wireless access in the Amsterdam airport
Amazing that I’ve been to Europe many times, yet the second I’m in the foreign environment of the airport I do something like get in line to get coffee and forget whether I have to get euros to pay for it until I’m at the cashier and have a moment of mortified panic. Fortunately, it turns out I can pay in dollars, but I may as well throw away the entire bill because I only get change back in euros, which I probably won’t need to use again and it’s too little money to bother paying the fee to change back to US currency. Sneaky buggers. Anyway, I am happy to be back in the land of good cappuccino again. NOT happy to be back in the land of indoor smokers. Some woman is sitting at a table with a small child and a man, smoking away, and two older couples who were eating just got up and left after having a loud disagreement with her over the appropriateness of her habit in the only sitdown eating area. My sympathies lie mostly with the child, who doesn’t know enough to know her mom is blatantly endangering her health. The part of the Amsterdam airport I was in for two hours was sterile, ugly and cold; every gate was segregated into these glass-walled, cement-floored, grey rooms along the main corridor.Amazingly, the flight from Amsterdam to Khartoum and Addis had LESS leg room and overhead space than the cramped transatlantic flight, evidenced by the fact that I nearly got a hernia trying to shove my overhead bag in and was that annoying girl who required a man to take pity on her and help her with her luggage, and my backpack didn’t fit under the seat in front of me and I sat with my legs cramped to the side, encroaching on the leg room of the small boy seated next to me. Behind me there was every traveller’s nightmare: a small child who alternated between shrieking sporadically (when they get into a rhythm you can start to tune them out; not this one, it was a slight shock every time) and rocketing his body into the back of my chair with such force my HEAD would bounce forward. The entire 6 1/2 hours to Khartoum. Oddly, it didn’t drive me totally insane, as I was pretty dazed and uncomfortable already and just couldn’t be bothered to care. Once I awoke from a cat nap and felt a small hand on my shoulder; and looking over at me, head wedged through the space between the sheets, was a large pair of inquiring brown eyes and rounded cheeks curving in a slight smile, which widened as I smiled back at him. He was really damn cute, which begins to compensate for making my seat a hellride.
On to Addis
Going through customs was a joke. No one even asked me a question; I just put my bags on the Xray belt and picked them up and, after glancing around to make sure none of the soldiers with antique Italian rifles were going to chase me down, walked outside, where I saw to my immense relief my name printed on a piece of paper (and spelled right!) held up by a nice guy named Benyamen, who works for the hotel. He unloaded my embarrassing amount of luggage into the minivan and we took off about .2 miles down the road to the Lalibela Hotel (I thought I packed pretty light for a year’s worth, but I wonder if people think “this silly tourist girl, thinks she needs to bring her own damn plumbing system for a safari” or something like that).
It was nighttime and I couldn’t see very well due to fatigue and wearing glasses so I decided against adventuring outside and, once checked in, went downstairs to the bar and got bottled water (which I have to use to brush my teeth with, a caution I’m pretty sure I will dispense of within a few months because it’s annoying) and a beer, because suddenly I was wired despite not having slept much during the flights. The bartender asked me which beer I’d like and I said, “you choose” and it was quite good—crisp and light, yet another example of foods everyone and their blind grandmother can manufacture better than the States.
There was no internet access and no way to make international phone calls—apparently you have to do those from a mobile with a special telecom card and there aren’t public phones—so I hoped that people back home could just assume I made it OK and not worry (heh). I ate Sara’s yummy cookies and watched CNN world and some bad Bond movie (after Connery and before Brosnan—I didn’t recognize the guy) while marveling that everyone in the commercials looked Arabic, not Ethiopian, despite speaking in Amharic, the dominant local language. I was stumped at this one advertisement until the end when I saw the labeling on the bottle, called “Fair and Lovely”—it was for skin bleaching! Yikes. The windows open to the side road and a skyline, which made me happy, the air smelled like woodsmoke, and there was a rainstorm at night which made for good sleeping, despite the leaks on the carpet.
Sunday dawned sunny (rainy season means brief, violent downpours in the afternoon) and I dragged myself out of bed at 9 (2 AM my time) and got breakfast downstairs, with fresh OJ and great coffee. I wandered outside for a while; the hotel is located around the corner from Pathfinder’s offices, which are closed on Sunday of course but still have two guards sitting out there, whom I chatted up a bit. This neighborhood is a small enclave behind a major road, separated from the airport and highway by a random field where people are grazing their cows and goats, which meander placidly along the gutted dirt roads. It’s quiet; a few people cheerfully shouted out “Hello good morning!” to me as I walked past, and I ran into a family begging, suffering from what appears to be leprosy, the first of many. Everyone I’ve talked to has been extremely polite and helpful, while reserved. I’m looking forward to going to the offices tomorrow and meeting people and expanding my ability to move around (in part due to my desire to put certain key things in a safe at the office, as it’s not entirely OK to leave stuff here at the hotel and it’s definitely not OK to carry it around with me while exploring, say, downtown.) My first day being a Sunday, I don’t want to call staff and bother them while they are with their families and such.
Every time I start to think about the magnitude of this venture as it applies to my daily life, my breath catches and my heart speeds up and I have to remind myself that in the bigger scheme of things, this is nothing. People do far scarier and grander things all the time—from the kids who pack their bags for four years of college and hopefully permanent employment in the U.S. without knowing when or if they can come home, to people to flee their homes with nothing but the clothes on their back, to people who routinely travel halfway around the world to find work to support their families back home—in comparison, this is piddling. It’s astonishing how adaptive people are.
I feel like a mentally challenged person in this new environment: I don’t understand the simplest things, like the phones and tips and roads; I can’t make my way around on foot or via public transport; I don’t know how or where to get food for myself or how to dress appropriately; I am afraid of the water and the floors and obsessively wash my hands; I am totally reliant on the help of strangers, many of whom barely understand me. Yet in a few days I will have overcome several of these challenges and in a few weeks I’ll have mastered more, and so on until eventually I will feel like I understand my surroundings again and this helplessness and ignorance will have abated until the next major change in my environment, which I will be able to face with greater confidence and better resources. At least that’s what I am telling myself.
posted by Margot @ 9:54 AM
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