I'm sitting in the corner of an airport bar sipping beer and facing the ADDIS ABABA DUTY FREE SHOP, which sells booze, TV's and big six-pack sized bags of KitKat bars. The electricity keeps on snapping on and off and each time it comes back on, the big neon lights overhead spend five minutes warming up, buzzing like cicadas stuck in low gear among the angular mesh of tubing that holds up the roof. It's a warehouse, more or less.

The bar itself is dark green marble under low hanging lights that reflect brightly off the sweaty bald spots of a half-dozen Chinese businessmen who are silently sipping their beer and gently collapsing and inflating with each breath, looking for all the world like a row of bellows as they exhale cigarette smoke that drifts past their little pools of light and up in to the dark. Little smokestacks they are, mascots, sitting hunched in rumpled gray suits and staring - as far as I can tell - at their warped reflections in the espresso machine.

My layover is about six hours long, just enough time for a momentary respite before plunging in to the second quarter of this odd little spurt of dot-hopping. You often read complaints from the introspective set about how planes have robbed us of the journey; of our sense of distance and the time required to emotionally prepare for some new set of rules and realities; and though I adore flying, I think they're on to something. Especially as commerce gains a foothold in international airports, (european ones in particular now force you to weave through duty-free shops just to get to your terminal) the real movement of a trip feels like teleporting between shopping malls that carry exactly the same thing. There are ALWAYS KitKat bars. Always.

The woman seated to my left just pulled out a thick stack of spiral notebooks (the spiral on top, reporter-style) and is busily tapping away at her netbook as she sips a tall beer, adding to what appears to be an impressively long document. Intrepid reporter? Fastidious historian? Lunatic scribbler? I'll resist actually getting up to find out. The notebook stack is the same size as one of those those big yellow sponges that you use to clean cars with and is all bound up with rubber bands. God knows where she's been, but it looks as though something significant was sopped up, and I hope - a projected insecurity perhaps - that she has found what she was looking for.

A man just walked by with a laptop balanced on his head.

My own notebook (a limp little steno-pad snagged in Nairobi) is less sponge than hurriedly folded map (dot, dot, dot) and try as I might I can't squeeze even one vaguely convincing blog post out of the entries. This goaround, my sponge was a camera. It's such an addictively effective way to freeze, simplify and elegantly contain a moment that over the course of the past month my journaling sessions have become increasingly brief, eventually resolving in to bullet points that I might use as photo captions. Man 0, Robots 1.

An older couple (short American woman wearing adventure sandals and a droopy safari vest, her German husband shod in immaculate white nikes) just arrived at the bar. She got a cappuccino, he a little can-sized stein of beer. A sparkly R&B rendition of 'Killing Me Softly' swells to a crescendo on the radio. The woman rubs her hands vigorously with hand sanitizer after finishing her cappuccino and discussion turns to how she will 'never piss in a hole again as long as [she] lives.' The bathrooms in Addis apparently have 'those fucking holes'. The German makes a sympathetic sound in to his beer and begins to organize receipts.

I realize that some of you were hoping for an entry on, oh, AFRICA, and I don't blame you. Maybe later. This entry is really just the result of my having had an espresso for the first time in over a month and an hour to let it burn off through my fingertips. Photos soon.

Comments

Helen
I had one panicky moment of thinking I was the lunatic scribbler seated to your left. Thankfully I had a picture to remind me that I was sitting across from you and to your right.

Aerdna
I like your descriptions. I always do. I also want you to write about Africa (though, technically, Addis IS Africa). No malaria yet?