One month anniversary, Pi Day

I'd almost forgotten that Pi Day means more to me over here in Ethiopia than it normally does. Aside from celebrating one of the more significant numbers in existence and a good excuse to eat pie (if I could find any) it marks my one month anniversary in Ethiopia. I just checked my email and though I doubt she knew it was Pi Day she has offered to bake me a pie upon my return, it's like she read my mind or knew about the holiday. Yes, that's right it was Valentine's Day, the most romantic day of the year that I flew in to Addis Ababa International Airport, lost my luggage and my driver and then had to coerce a friendly cabby into helping me out (then he extorted me, which was about what I thought would happen)

Anyways there's been some requests in email form about A) my house and B) my job, which I originally put off writing about because I didn't want to fall into the rut of writing about my daily routine, but it's true I should at least write about these things once. I will start with my house.

My house has two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom and a large extra room which is for storage and is used as such by the landlord's family. I have no use for storage as I don't even have enough stuff to fill the one bookshelf I have for storage. The house has electricity, tiled floors, some big red sofas and a lot of furniture that looks like it came from a school, because it did. I'm borrowing two tables and 6 chairs from the school I work at while I'm here. In fact, that's where the bookshelf and bed came from as well, but they don't look like they came from a school. There is no hot water, but if I shower in the evenings the water is luke warm at least to start the shower so if I wash in under a couple minutes it won't get freezing cold. Showers in the morning are scary and I don't take these anymore. The downside of showering at night is that I tend to have wet hair when I go to bed and I wake up with interesting hairstyles, some people were laughing at my hair this morning because I couldn't be bothered to get it under control and it sort of poofs out anime style. This is the secret to anime hair, showering before bed.

I live by myself in the biggest house with the least stuff on a gated compound with two families of indeterminable size who both own more things than I do. I recognize that one is the landlord's family and one is his servants family, but I can't figure out whose children are whose or in fact whose living on the property and who is only visiting. I would probably be just as happy staying where one of these families are living, but I'm not paying my own rent so I don't mind having more space and they seem to think that it's the appropriate arrangement. I could perhaps learn more about the families I lived with if I could communicate with them, but this is impossible. Those of you who have met Kit (my landlord in Kerrisdale) will know that he has a thick accent that makes him difficult to talk to, my current landlord has a thicker accent and less of a grasp on the English language. His English is the best amongst all of the people I share the compound with and my Amharic is well almost nonexistent. As a result I have resolved to not really knowing who lives here.

Jordie out