On the ground!

Yes, I am finally here. After much administrivia and two 8 hour flights I landed in Addis on Monday night. The flight stopped in Khartoum on the way to Addis so I got a good look at the Nile and the city from the air. Very impressive in a uniformly-brown-two-story-building kinda way. I also now know where every ex-Soviet cargo airplane that can fly and carry a bag of wheat is parked - at Khartoum Int'l Airport. They wouldn't let any Addis passengers off the plane despite refueling ongoing. A few brave souls tried to take pictures from the top of the stairs, but "3 rounds warming" soon had them scuttling back to their seats ;-)

Addis is almost the exact opposite of Khartoum, in so many ways. It is green and cool and hilly. The city sprawls through the valleys and up the many surrounding hills, there are about 4 million people living here. Having travelled in Africa once before I was somewhat ready for the culture shock but the abject poverty mingling with Western-style wealth is still off-putting. Extremely friendly people everywhere with much shaking of hands. The traditional way is to support your offered right hand at the elbow with the left hand. This is to emphasize, so I am told, the importance of your greeting, as they need two hands to shake yours. Greetings must be exchanged upon meeting, even with someone you know very well. I tried my few words of Amharic (the local language) but kept getting questions as to why my hovercraft was full of eels.

I jumped right into the local cuisine as well. My two visits to Ethiopian restos in Canada had given me a basic familiarity, so my colleagues were surprised when I ordered only local dishes. Some of them had been here for 6 months and never gone off the Western side of the menu. When is Addis Ababa, do like the Addis Ababanians? Addis Ababites? Right?

I got over the jet lag and altitude change (Addis is at 2700m) fairly quickly and got down to work. Many meetings and briefings with lots of new faces. The team lives in a house in a quiet (more on that later) part of Addis. Down the road is an enormous church under construction. I was told that it is being built, slowly, entirely with donated hand labour and materials. The streets are always full of vehicles and pedestrians. I have driven in Sicily and thought that was chaotic, but the Sicilians got nothin' on the drivers of Addis.

That is about it on my arrival. I will make more regular posts now that I have a computer.

Go Oilers go!