Law, Partially

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...

There are few streetlights on the roads of Addis Ababa, and often the power is out anyway. Businesses tend to be far from the street and sometimes behind walls, and the businesses aren’t brightly lit anyway, except for small fruit stands and meat kiosks with their huge sides of beef hanging inside. What I’m getting to is, the streets at night are dark and somewhat foreboding. On my second to last night in Addis Ababa, as I was walking the dark streets near my house, through the gauntlet of whores, to reach a restaurant that serves Ethiopian honey wine, called  tej , I was thinking of Lethal Weapon 3, where Danny Glover is in his last week on the police force before retirement when all hell breaks loose in Los Angeles. I thought, my last days in Addis, wouldn’t it suck if something bad happened now. But nothing bad did happen. The worst thing that happened was drinking the  tej . It’s not very delicious. And all the way from Ethiopia to Singapore was a series of minor ...