The OAP and me

Posted on 23 Jun 2013 by lornaofarabia

With Alekka back in the states for the summer, this will be the longest time Andreas and I have ever been our own together without any of our children. We each already had kids when we met 29 years ago, and since then I think a week is the longest we’ve been away without any of them.  But in two years, which I expect to fly by in no time, we’ll be empty nesters. So this summer is good practice.

Andreas was a bit of a grouch last time we were in London. That was a couple of weeks after we had to evacuate from Damascus, which probably had something to do with it.  I think it might also have been related to the snow, the tiny bedsit, and the seven suitcases.  And also because we got here via Boston, where we had failed to get the jobs we wanted on the first pass.  At any rate my spouse’s attitude earned him the name “the Artful Codger” during our stay in the city, because he just didn’t seem to be enjoying our visit.

My occasionally grumpy spouse seems to like Britain much better this time. We saw lots of shows, the weather is good, the food is great. And yesterday we went down to Victoria coach station to buy our tickets to Dover, and guess what?  Age 60 and over get a 30% discount.

Andreas’s ticket lists his class as “SP”. Senior pensioner, maybe? But I remember earlier times when the over-60s here were called OAPs: Old Age Pensioners.  Heh heh.  If he gets grouchy again, he’s getting a new nickname.

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Giving London the stink-eye, with Alekka.

But I don’t think it will come to that. We’re on an adventure, just the two of us. It’s going to be a great summer.

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Alexandra Leaving

Posted on 22 Jun 2013 by lornaofarabia

(“Alexandra Leaving” is a Leonard Cohen song – one that he sang last night. Sigh.)

I took Alekka to Heathrow this morning. She is off to spend the rest of her summer in Oregon with her sister and other assorted siblings and friends.

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First thing you need for a big adventure – a new pair of traveling shoes

She was a little nervous about the trip – her first time traveling alone – but I’m confident she’ll do just fine and it will be a great experience for her.

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Wolfy and Balto are ready to go

As we entered the airport from the train station, a young woman with red hair walking toward us glanced our way, then away. Alekka murmured…  “Mom…  that was Amy Pond.”  Now if that’s not a good travel omen, I don’t know what is.

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Alekka gleefully texting everyone she knows about the airport sighting. A true Doctor Who fan, she’s even wearing her Tardis shirt.

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A new year and Old Ideas

Posted on 21 Jun 2013 by lornaofarabia

I’ve celebrated at least two other birthdays in London (#19 and #43), wonderful in their own ways, but this one (#54, yikes) was magical.

Alekka has been my daytime sightseeing companion this week while Andreas attends an American School of London teaching workshop. Our routine starts off the same each day, with a fortifying English breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, toast, marmalade, and milky tea at our hotel.

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Our charming guest house

Then – because we are Americans and tea doesn’t quite do it for us in the morning – we pick up lattes to go from the Costa coffeehouse on our walk to the West Hampstead tube station. From there, London is our oyster.

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Much more efficient than those little paper tickets (anybody else besides me old enough to remember those?)

Today our morning destination was Camden Town, where there is a huge open-air market and lots of interesting high street shops.  Sunday is the big market day, and I wondered how many stalls would be open on a Friday, but the shopping turned out to be even funkier and more fun than I remembered from last time I was there (30 years ago). I bargained for a great price on a Nepalese jacket, a fleece-lined one that ought to be useful in Scotland next month.

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In the afternoon we headed out to the Docklands, an area of the city I’d never seen before. It used to be just what it sounds like, warehouses and shipping facilities along the Thames. Urban redevelopment incentives in the 1980s and 1990s transformed it into a business and financial center that is also home to restaurants, shopping malls, parks, and performance spaces. It’s adjacent to the Greenwich peninsula, where the Millennium Dome – now called the 02 – is located.

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Alekka and I had an early dinner at Wasabi in the 02 complex. It’s a chain, but it’s good. In our short time here, we have visited either Wasabi or a similar place called Abokado every day – we’ve been seriously deprived of raw salmon in recent months and need to make up for lost time.

Andreas came out to meet us after his conference and we all went for a walk along the Thames, ending with a slice of birthday cake and coffee.

Then – the evening’s main attraction – a Leonard Cohen concert at the O2 pavilion.

He’s 79 years old but he still puts on a great show.
Second stop on the tour.

Leonard put on a fantastic show. He was on stage for three hours, with only only one or two songs turned over to his band members. He looked and sounded great, The tour promotes his newest album, Old Ideas, but he sang all the previous greats, too: Sisters of Mercy, Suzanne, Hallelujah, Chelsea Hotel, I’m Your Man, Bird on a Wire, So Long Marianne, Everybody Knows, The Partisan, Tower of Song. There are so many, which I guess makes sense as he’s been making albums for almost 50 years.

It was an excellent birthday. I’m already making plans to spend #56 here in 2015.

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Henry VIII

Posted on 20 Jun 2013 by lornaofarabia

I’ve been having a grand time revisiting some of my favorite London places, but I  also wanted to see a few new sights in this glorious city.  When I posted on Facebook that I was planning a trip to London, my friend Tracey said she’d just been there and recommended a visit to Hampton Court Palace.

window view bestHampton Court was a fine manor house when Cardinal Wolsey leased it in 1514. His improvements transformed the buildings and grounds into a full-on palace.  It’s located on the Thames a few miles southwest of central London.  The Cardinal and the royals used to get to it by barge, but we took the train.

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It was Ladies Day at Ascot, and we saw lots of toffs – and ladies with hats – at Waterloo station.

I’ve been reading Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s excellent 2009 novel about the court of Henry VIII. The events covered in the novel include Henry evicting Cardinal Wolsey from Hampton Court because the cardinal wasn’t able to get the Pope to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn. Hampton Court soon became a favorite residence of the King, who made it even grander than it already was.

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The astrological clock in Anne Boleyn’s Gate

A few monarchs later, the palace was also a favorite of William and Mary, but the Tudor style was passe so they hired Sir Christopher Wren in 1689 to knock down that pile of bricks and rebuild it in the more fashionable baroque style.

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The Fountain Court. You can see Tudor chimney behind.

As it happens, the remodel went over cost, and then Mary got smallpox and died, so the project was only half-finished. The palace is now half Tudor from Henry’s time, and half baroque from the time of William and Mary.  All of it is beautiful, and the gardens on the grounds are also quite lovely.

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Rose garden

Just an interesting aside… it might be a bit late for this, but I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. If for some reason I find myself in need of a new career, I will be an Experimental Food Historian.  There’s a team of folks who work in Henry VIII’s kitchens, making venison stew in giant copper pots, fashioning meat pies on big wooden boards, and roasting whole animals on spits. They want to find out exactly how it was done. I want to do that.

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And a few more pictures from Hampton Court Palace:

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On with the show

Posted on 19 Jun 2013 by lornaofarabia

I am loving London right now. I’ve been here before, several times: 1978, 1981, 1983 (for a few months that time), 2002, 2011, 2012.  On my first trip I was an 18 year old with a backpack, a student Eurailpass, and a full three months of summer stretching ahead of me. London was a pretty amazing place to launch the adventure. But I think I’m enjoying it even more this time around.

It’s hard to say why. Maybe because it’s more familiar, and I can visit all my favorite places. Maybe it’s that I’ve already seen the stuff you’re supposed to see, and now I can just do what I want. Or maybe it’s that I’m a grownup with a real job and can afford to go to a show EVERY SINGLE NIGHT!

Alekka and I saw “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” starring Daniel Radcliffe.  We were so close I could have hit him with a Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean.

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Then we saw War Horse, a play about a horse in World War I featuring horse-sized puppets (and live humans).

Lastly we saw the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical at Drury Lane.  Catchy songs. Impressive special effects. Awesome Oompa Loompas.

And we already have our tickets for Gabriel, a new play at Shakespeare’s Globe, for the night before we head back to Addis in August.

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Kaldi’s

Posted on 18 Jun 2013 by lornaofarabia
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A common scene on the campus lawns

Ethiopia is not only the cradle of mankind, it’s the birthplace of coffee. According to historian Antony Wild in Coffee: A Dark History, Lucy and her prehistoric friends might even have been chewing on the beans. Later, the first roasted coffee was likely made in the Ethiopian highlands where the coffee plant is indigenous. This bit of history is a source of great pride for Ethiopians, and coffee is a big deal here.  Special events – visitors, the opening of a new shop, new babies, retirements, graduations – are always celebrated with a traditional coffee ceremony.

According to Ethiopian tradition, coffee’s special properties were first discovered by a goatherd named Kaldi.  One day Kaldi noticed his goats dancing around in a particularly energetic fashion.  He observed the frolicsome herd eating red berries from a certain bush.  He gathered some of the berries and took them home to his wife, who figured out how to roast, grind, and boil them to make a drink (there are other versions of the story involving holy men, but I like the resourceful wife motif).  Pretty soon Kaldi and his wife were selling coffee beans locally and to the traders who carried them overseas. The rest, as they say, is history.

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There is a chain of coffeehouses in Addis Ababa named after Kaldi the goatherd.  It’s the Ethiopian version of Starbucks. There is no actual Starbucks here, just like there is no McDonalds or Chili’s or KFC (no overseas chains or franchises at all, in fact), because of regulations protecting domestic commerce. Kaldi’s offers espresso drinks, ice cream (an unusual treat in Ethiopia), cakes, sandwiches, and other light fare.

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The new Lebu Kaldi’s has a car park guard

Last fall, there was a new building under construction a couple of blocks up the street from our apartment building.  In our early days at the school, before we had cars and ICS provided a bus for the Varnero faranji to ride to and from Lebu, our upstairs neighbor Nella would always remark when we drove by the growing glass and chrome structure: “that’s going to be a Kaldi’s.”  Ha ha.  Good joke, Nella – there’s nothing out here but cows and goats.

Nella was right. Last month the building finally opened up, and the first two floors are a new Kaldi’s. Now that’s progress!

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Celebrating our last day in Lebu with a Kaldi’s vanilla “frappoochino”

Posted in Addis Ababa, Background, Food | 1 Comment

Moving along

Posted on 8 Jun 2013 by lornaofarabia

Just a month ago, the end of the school year seemed a point on the distant horizon. Now suddenly we have only a week left in which to accomplish what looks to be an impossibly long list of tasks.

There are, of course, the expected and customary school obligations: final exams to score, grades (with written comments for each student) to submit, library books to gather in and inventory, etc. etc. etc.  But on top of that, Andreas and I got word last week – after a very long wait – that our request to move to a house had been approved by the school.

Hurray! We are all excited. This is exactly what we wanted. The house is about a mile from ICS, which is walkable, so all three of us won’t always have to be on the same transportation schedule. Alekka will be able to hang out with friends (the social life of ICS high schoolers tends to focus on the campus), and life will be more fluid.  Plus we’ll have a yard where we can plant a proper garden.

Here’s the catch… we are leaving for summer break the day after we are finished work. The house won’t be ready until later in the summer, but we have to be out of the Varnero apartment by June 30 so that maintenance can make it ready for a new hire to move in. This means that by next Saturday, we have to be all packed, and our housekeeper and our new guards (which we have yet to hire) will need to oversee the movers (whom we also have yet to hire) while we are away.   Our housekeeper will have to find a way to move Rosie and Gil and get them settled in. We also have to get the guardhouse ready for the two guards, who will live there on 24 hour shift rotations – they need a stove, mattress, blankets, soap, and towels.  And we need to buy things they need to do their job, like flashlights and yard tools and a garden hose and car care stuff.  There’s an awful lot to think of that we haven’t had to think about before.

The housekeeper will make the new house ready for us, and the new guards will guard it (and our stuff) until we arrive home from vacation the day before we start work.  It feels like we’re taking a lot on faith, but this is how it’s done.

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Our new place. The people in the photo are the current caretaker and her daughter.

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Put to the test

Posted on 6 Jun 2013 by lornaofarabia

The end of the academic year is upon us.  For ICS high schoolers this means what it does for students everywhere: finals. Da-da-da-DUM.

ICS high school students are on a special three-day exam schedule this week. On Thursday and Friday, and Monday next week, they all file into the gym twice a day to sit in regimented rows of desks where they take two-hour exams in each of their academic subjects.  No books and no notes are permitted for any subject area.

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The chemistry teacher put a little candy on each desk this morning. Isn’t that nice?

Eleventh-graders all have six exams each, but some in grades 9 and 10 have fewer. Yesterday Alekka had English and Spanish. Today is chemistry. Monday is math (her  pre-calc teacher happens to be American, otherwise it would be “maths”).

Although most ICS teachers are American, the official academic lingo around here tends toward the British. I’m not exactly sure why that is, probably the IB program plus the school’s continued effort to rebrand itself as international rather than “the American school,” as it was previously known.

So instead of “reviewing” for the tests, students “revise”. They don’t “take” exams, they “sit” them. And “proctoring” is known as “invigilation.” Sounds painful, doesn’t it?  I think for many of them it is, at least a little bit. They sure have been studying like crazy for the past couple of weeks.

An Australian teacher said to me this morning that she thinks “proctoring” sounds worse than “invigilation.” Those plain-speaking educators down under call it “supervising.” Imagine that.

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The raw and the cooked

Posted on 2 Jun 2013 by lornaofarabia

It’s hard to believe 30 years have passed since fellow campaigners at Walter Mondale HQ introduced me to Ethiopian food at the (now, sadly, closed) Red Sea restaurant in Adams Morgan.  My first time there I fell in love with a dish called kitfo.

Kitfo is chopped raw lean beef mixed with spiced butter, similar to steak tartare but with Ethiopian seasonings.  It’s usually served with greens and a sort of cottage cheese called ayeb. It’s the dish by which I judge Ethiopian restaurants in the US, and it’s the one I crave when I’ve been away from Little Ethiopia for too long.

Although kitfo is available in various states of cooked-ness – two possible options are all the way cooked, like crumbly hamburger, and  “lebleb”, which is slightly browned and warm – I am of the opinion that it tastes best when it’s plain old raw.

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Now that I’m here in Big Ethiopia, guess how sad I was when my new faranji friends told me I shouldn’t eat raw kitfo here. You probably don’t want to read the gory details.  But there is some bad funky stuff you can get from uncooked meat in this part of the world.

I find that there are always a few daredevils in the group. One colleague tells me her husband eats piles of kitfo and lives with the consequences (frequent de-wormings and the occasional bout of typhoid).  I’ve indulged on only two occasions since we’ve been here, both at the same restaurant. So far, so good. And I’m starting to get those cravings again. Must be a full moon.

Posted in Ethiopia, Food | 4 Comments

The Elizabethan ruff of misery

Posted on 28 May 2013 by lornaofarabia

Our kittens Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (as Alekka finally named them, never mind that they are brother and sister) celebrated their 4-month birthday a couple of weeks ago.  Maybe “celebrated” is the wrong word, because what it meant for our kitties was a spay-and-neuter party at Dr. Sisay’s Ody Mobile Vet clinic.

The good doctor does house calls – that’s why it’s called a mobile vet – but because I didn’t fancy using our dining area as an operating room, we opted to have the procedures done at the vet’s storefront surgery.

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That’s our vet on the porch, fixing something (not a cat; he does that inside with the door shut)

Rosie went first with no problems – until afterwards, when he was supposed to wear the plastic cone for two weeks.  Bad enough the thing caused him to misjudge space and mass so he crashed into doorjambs and fell off chairs. But the worst part was that his sister Gil would have nothing to do with him.  Every time Rosie and his cone came within 6 feet of Gil, she arched her back, fluffed up her fur, and hissed menacingly.  Poor Rosie. He’d lost his only friend.

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Rosie bumps into the kitchen cabinet.

A few days later we took Gil in to be spayed. Rosie got an unexpected reprieve on the cone (unexpected by us, anyway; Rosie probably assumed he’d have to wear it forever) when the vet informed us that the clinic only owns one cone. We would need to take it off Rosie and put it on Gil.

We wondered if Rosie would hiss and run away from Gil the same way she did to him, but Rosie was surprisingly solicitous of his sad little sister. I thought maybe he remembered his own sorry coned condition and was showing empathy.  But my friend Leslie in LA, who knows a lot about cats, pointed out that it was more likely that the now-familiar smell of the clinic and antiseptics didn’t scare Rosie any more.  The two played together just like old times – enough that Gil’s stitches tore out and we had to separate the cats until both kitties were healed up. You’ve never heard such sad meowing.

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Gil kept up her regular bathing routine, but only succeeded in washing the cone.

So, here’s an interesting feature of the spay and neuter process in Ethiopia – the vet offered envelopes containing the removed parts to Andreas when he went to pick up the kitties.  Testes, Mr. Andreas? No?  How about a couple of ovaries?  Not sure if the gonads were intended as proof of the vet having completed the operation, or whether there was something we might want to do with the pieces. Andreas was too surprised to ask; he just told Dr. Sisay no thanks, he could keep them.

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