Friday, December 05, 2003
A Man Called Garbage
Friday 31st October to Monday 3rd November
Hallowe'en! There's a party tonight in Asmara. I'm up and at the bus-stop by 9am but the bus takes a while to leave. This time it's a rickety old Italian banger with benches for seats and fake marble veneer on the ceiling. I'm in the best seat on the bus: the one by the door so there's plenty of leg-room. Unfortunately, I realise later that my knee was resting against a very greasy door handle, so my trousers are smudged with red and grey. Why is the grease bright red? So you can see when you've smudged some on your trousers, I suppose.
12.45 and I'm a little late to meet Jo as arranged. I head straight for the American bar -- tables on the pavement of Liberty Avenue are a honeypot for foreigners, who meet each other there or sit and watch the smart set pass by. A few minutes pass, wondering where Jo is, when Tom and Fliss turn up. It's been a long time, so I'm eager to hear their stories of domestic bliss in their hybrid house -- a hidmo attached to a modern-style concrete block. Halfway through our conversation, I realise that I actually arranged to meet Jo at the Modka cafe! By this time it's half past one and there's no chance of her being there. We meet up in the end, after lunch with Tom and Fliss, and the two of us book into the Capri pension.
I've sorted out my exit / re-entry visa at Immigration, so we've a couple of hours to kill before the party. Fish dinner at Rendezvous -- the best restaurant I've been to so far. The food is excellent. I have the Rendezvous Special: unnamed fish in a lemony sauce with rice, Jo has the stir-fried grouper. Delicious, and accompanied by Pink Floyd The Wall, bizarrely. We're the only diners in the restaurant, possibly because they are playing Pink Floyd The Wall. Jimi Hendrix glowers down at us from the wall.
No. I didn't dress up, but others did. They paraded between volunteer houses, covering the length of the city in their spooky costumes, and completely freaking out the Asmarinos. Araki and silly games ensue: blindfold guess the gooey substances, toilet-paper mummy wrapping, pin the facial feature back on the volunteer's picture, and apple bobbing from string. We're both pretty tired so head back to the pension well before it all ends.
The next day we wake thinking of ice-cream juice floaters. The Capri has a juice bar downstairs: a fifties style latteria in a wide open hall, selling juice in pint tankards with ice-cream bobbing in the middle. Delicious, and pretty much the deciding factor in our stay at the pension. We have Tabby and his ice-cream addiction to thank for the introduction to the juice bar. But that will have to wait: there's shopping and emailing to do. And before all that, a chip butty in the Cathedral Snack Bar.
Finally we get our juice then we're on the bus to Serejeka.
Serejeka, and the walk up the hill to Shimangus Lalai. It's still fairly early afternoon so the sun is high. Jo's neighbour Hadas is there with her customary shriek of "Jo-annnnnnaaaaaa!". She's great fun: she has decided it is her mission to teach Jo Tigrinya so every chance she gets she screeches "Jo-annnnnnnaaaaaa! Se-at?" ("What's the time?"), and Jo has to give the time in Tigrinya. Her daughter turns up with a jerry can full of water and Hadas decides that Jo should try it on for size. Hee hee! Just let me fetch my camera. So there we are, me giggling and finding the best angle for a picture while Hadas and her daughter tie the jerry can to Jo, wrapping rope around her shoulders and waist. She looks like an arthritic tortoise.
Later, Hadas is teaching Jo and me some random Tigrinya words on the steps to Jo's porch. She says something and it sounds like she says "garbage". Garbage? Most of the foreign words in Tigrinya are Italian or Arabic. I didn't expect to hear the word garbage. Hang on a minute... she's pointing at me... "Garbage". The light dawns. Not "Garbage": "Gavin"! My name is "Gavin"! Jo is in hysterics and so is Hadas, and so am I, after play-acting offended. It's even funnier that
Hadas still has no idea what "garbage" means.
Now then. We've bought some wine. Not the local stuff. *Real* red wine. Imported and three or four times as expensive as the local stuff but, crucially, *drinkable*. Jo rustles up "cabbage surprise" (she has a surfeit of cabbage) and we set to drinking the wine. It's amazing. It's been eight weeks since either of us has had a sip of anything approaching red wine (Asmara wine, as I've implied before, is a travesty of trade description). It's delicious.
A cold, cold night. At least after Keren it feels freezing. The wind is up high and I'm shivering. Jo seems relatively unaffected: I guess I must have become acclimatised to the Keren heat. The wine's good and the company's better so we have fun playing silly games until tiredness catches up with us.
Hallowe'en! There's a party tonight in Asmara. I'm up and at the bus-stop by 9am but the bus takes a while to leave. This time it's a rickety old Italian banger with benches for seats and fake marble veneer on the ceiling. I'm in the best seat on the bus: the one by the door so there's plenty of leg-room. Unfortunately, I realise later that my knee was resting against a very greasy door handle, so my trousers are smudged with red and grey. Why is the grease bright red? So you can see when you've smudged some on your trousers, I suppose.
12.45 and I'm a little late to meet Jo as arranged. I head straight for the American bar -- tables on the pavement of Liberty Avenue are a honeypot for foreigners, who meet each other there or sit and watch the smart set pass by. A few minutes pass, wondering where Jo is, when Tom and Fliss turn up. It's been a long time, so I'm eager to hear their stories of domestic bliss in their hybrid house -- a hidmo attached to a modern-style concrete block. Halfway through our conversation, I realise that I actually arranged to meet Jo at the Modka cafe! By this time it's half past one and there's no chance of her being there. We meet up in the end, after lunch with Tom and Fliss, and the two of us book into the Capri pension.
I've sorted out my exit / re-entry visa at Immigration, so we've a couple of hours to kill before the party. Fish dinner at Rendezvous -- the best restaurant I've been to so far. The food is excellent. I have the Rendezvous Special: unnamed fish in a lemony sauce with rice, Jo has the stir-fried grouper. Delicious, and accompanied by Pink Floyd The Wall, bizarrely. We're the only diners in the restaurant, possibly because they are playing Pink Floyd The Wall. Jimi Hendrix glowers down at us from the wall.
No. I didn't dress up, but others did. They paraded between volunteer houses, covering the length of the city in their spooky costumes, and completely freaking out the Asmarinos. Araki and silly games ensue: blindfold guess the gooey substances, toilet-paper mummy wrapping, pin the facial feature back on the volunteer's picture, and apple bobbing from string. We're both pretty tired so head back to the pension well before it all ends.
The next day we wake thinking of ice-cream juice floaters. The Capri has a juice bar downstairs: a fifties style latteria in a wide open hall, selling juice in pint tankards with ice-cream bobbing in the middle. Delicious, and pretty much the deciding factor in our stay at the pension. We have Tabby and his ice-cream addiction to thank for the introduction to the juice bar. But that will have to wait: there's shopping and emailing to do. And before all that, a chip butty in the Cathedral Snack Bar.
Finally we get our juice then we're on the bus to Serejeka.
Serejeka, and the walk up the hill to Shimangus Lalai. It's still fairly early afternoon so the sun is high. Jo's neighbour Hadas is there with her customary shriek of "Jo-annnnnnaaaaaa!". She's great fun: she has decided it is her mission to teach Jo Tigrinya so every chance she gets she screeches "Jo-annnnnnnaaaaaa! Se-at?" ("What's the time?"), and Jo has to give the time in Tigrinya. Her daughter turns up with a jerry can full of water and Hadas decides that Jo should try it on for size. Hee hee! Just let me fetch my camera. So there we are, me giggling and finding the best angle for a picture while Hadas and her daughter tie the jerry can to Jo, wrapping rope around her shoulders and waist. She looks like an arthritic tortoise.
Later, Hadas is teaching Jo and me some random Tigrinya words on the steps to Jo's porch. She says something and it sounds like she says "garbage". Garbage? Most of the foreign words in Tigrinya are Italian or Arabic. I didn't expect to hear the word garbage. Hang on a minute... she's pointing at me... "Garbage". The light dawns. Not "Garbage": "Gavin"! My name is "Gavin"! Jo is in hysterics and so is Hadas, and so am I, after play-acting offended. It's even funnier that
Hadas still has no idea what "garbage" means.
Now then. We've bought some wine. Not the local stuff. *Real* red wine. Imported and three or four times as expensive as the local stuff but, crucially, *drinkable*. Jo rustles up "cabbage surprise" (she has a surfeit of cabbage) and we set to drinking the wine. It's amazing. It's been eight weeks since either of us has had a sip of anything approaching red wine (Asmara wine, as I've implied before, is a travesty of trade description). It's delicious.
A cold, cold night. At least after Keren it feels freezing. The wind is up high and I'm shivering. Jo seems relatively unaffected: I guess I must have become acclimatised to the Keren heat. The wine's good and the company's better so we have fun playing silly games until tiredness catches up with us.
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