There were many tourism advertisement posters
posted in my offices at the Ethiopian Ministry of Trade and Industry. The women
of some tribes in southern Ethiopia don’t wear tops, and tourists actually go
down there to gawk. It seems too voyeuristic to me, but maybe all tourism is
anyway…
And the lovely Ministry of Trade and
Industry itself. This is the ministry in charge of Ethiopia’s bid to join the
WTO, and this is where I spent my summer working. The squiggles above the Latin
characters are the Ethiopic script, aka the Ge’ez script. Amharic is written in
this script.
Ethiopian attorneys. That is indeed a picture of an Indian god behind us because we went to an Indian restaurant for my Addis Ababa farewell lunch. I had a speech planned to give about my time in Ethiopia, but my boss didn’t ask me to give a farewell speech, so the lunch was unceremonious and featured mainly me impressing everyone with how much I can overeat.
Ski Dubai inside the Mall of the
Emirates. Behind these glass plates is a small toboggan run for kids. To get a
good view of the actual ski slope, behind the toboggan run, you have to go to a
restaurant. My belly was still full from Ethiopian Indian food the day before,
and I was too tired to have a drink after my night spent in a chair at the
Dubai airport with the hundreds of Indian and Pakistanis also sleeping at the
airport, so I didn’t go to one of these restaurants.
Burj al Arab, the self-proclaimed
7-star hotel. It’s in the shape of a dhow, a small, traditional Arab sailing
ship. This building is right on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Notice the haze
in the air. That’s sand picked up by the wind.
Burj Dubai, the future tallest
building in the world. There are at least 8 cranes in this photo, and only 3 of
them are on the being-built Burj. I’d much prefer to invest in the crane
business in Dubai rather than the property business. The property market is
going to crash hard, yet buildings are still being built. Hundreds and hundreds
of skyscrapers are being built.
my best Tunisian friend and I in the
Arabian desert
camel jockeying, part of the "authentic" Bedouin experience
The historic National University of
Singapore (NUS) Bukit Timah campus. There is a much larger NUS campus, but the law
school is at this small old one. These buildings originally housed Raffles
College, a school built by the British when Singapore was a colony. Singapore
was founded by the British. My professor tells me, Singapore was placed where
it is in order to drive a wedge into the Dutch East India colonies in the
Indonesian archipelago. The British weren’t the first European power in Asia
and as a latecomer had some strategic asserting to do.
Such covered walkways are built into
the street-level of many, many buildings in Singapore, though they come in many
forms. They keep the sun and rain off walkers. Here, they also keep the sun and
rain away from the windows of the buildings — in the old days there was no air
conditioning, so the windows would have been opened. Now it’s icy cool inside
these old college buildings, and the windows are high-tech and energy
efficiently sealed. It’s hot and humid outdoors like Missouri on a hot August
day, and it’s supposed to be like this all year long. There are also bursts of
vicious rain showers, which I am also told will be a
regular occurrence for all 12 months of the year. Singapore is one
degree north of the equator.
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