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Arrived here from Toronto on Sunday evening. The weather had been, for Oslo, unusually hot for the previous couple of weeks, in the 30’s, but it broke a couple of days before we arrived and is now a much more bearable mid-20’s. This is more than usually pleasant since AC is not usually required here and most homes and hotels forgo the cost of installing it. Our hotel, The Grand, for example does not have it and our first night was very warm as buildings were slowly losing their heat from the previous heat wave. Since then it has been cooler with overcast skies and occasional rain, a foretaste of what’s to come on our Arctic sail.

We have been planning and looking forward to this adventure since our friends, Chuck and Eileen told us about it last fall. It will be an adventure for us on a couple of fronts, it is a sailing cruise, albeit a small one, about 190 people, but a form of travel that we have studiously avoided throughout all our travels and we are traveling with Chuck and Eileen instead of our usual 2 person tag team of V and I. We are looking forward to it immensely because it is literally the only way to see the areas that we will be traveling over and through and because we are looking forward to spending time with C&E who are intrepid travelers in their own right.

So, a couple of days to wander through Oslo and get a sense of the city then a charter flight to Svalbard in the high Arctic where we pick up the ship and began our adventure.

Davos Switzerland, sunset, from my hotel window

V and I both left Nairobi on March 30, she in the afternoon on Emirates with an overnight hotel stay in Dubai and me at midnight straight through via Brussels. We both arrived in Toronto within 90 minutes of each other so I waited for her and we both took the same limo home. Jet lag is one of the few things that doesn’t get better with practice. I awoke with a dreadful cold and bronchitis but am committed this evening to attend an event that I wouldn’t miss for worlds. The company that I retired from as President a couple of years ago and whose Advisory Board I now chair, was awarded as one of Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies and tonight is the gala awards dinner.

Fabulous evening with Jim Cuddy and Blue Rodeo entertaining but by the time our award was given I was ready to sleep on my plate. Nonetheless It was moment of real pride to see a company that I had been part of almost from its inception grow and and succeed and be recognized for its accomplishments. Thrilled for my successor and the management team and thrilled to be part of the evening.

Long grinding week and jet lag and a bronchitis never far away. Daughter Di’s birthday was on March 2, two days before we left for Ethiopia but her birthday dinner was cancelled as she was down with the flu at that time, so we decided to have a joint birthday on April 5 to celebrate both hers and mine. We picked Bero in Leslieville because the new restaurant reviewer who has replaced Joanne Kates at the Globe and Mail swooned about it. My first frisson of warning came when I called to say it was a dinner to celebrate a birthday and asked if they could put a candle in the desert or something to recognize the event. I was told that, “We don’t do that sort of thing” and when I insisted that there must be something special that could be done I was curtly told that I should try telling the server at our table as they might be able to come up with something.

Put my nervousness down to jet lag and general crankiness and so we all showed up at the appointed hour to find the restaurant filled and our table waiting. That settled my nerves, after all if it was a less that pleasant experience, surely all these people would not be here. I should have paid attention to the fact that with the exception of V and I, no one else was older than their mid-30’s.

Menu was a grid of 3 items in a row by 4 items long, so you picked one of the 3 dishes in each of the 4 rows for your 4 courses. Service was slow and the restaurant was noisy and my alarm bells were now louder than my surroundings as I watched dishes pass me on the way to other tables. As was apparent from the menu and passing dishes, emphasis was clearly on plating, food design, and some weird kind of ingredient creativity. Further the large, disheveled and sweaty man whose only duty seemed to be to take the plates from the kitchen to the tables and mumble an incantation over them as he delivered them was not in fact the cognitively-challenged relative of one of the staff who was allowed to do this only to integrate him into the world of low-requirement service jobs, but the chef. He never ventured into the kitchen except to pick up and deliver dishes and for the rest of the time he loured at the back of the room not making eye contact nor helping the busy servers.

Food was an unmitigated disaster and one of the worst meals that it has been my displeasure to eat, and remember we have just returned from rural Ethiopia. Chef delivered the plates, mumbled something about the ingredients and left as if he was embarrassed or ashamed. He should have been both, as well as Chris Nutall-Smith the putative reviewer for the Globe and Mail. All four diners at our table were appalled and none of us could understand how a reviewer could have been so high in its praise nor why so many people would continue to patronize it. It was clearly a hot spot, earning its reputation with reviewers presumably based on the interesting combinations of beautifully plated messes of discordant ingredients, and weird and unpleasant enough to be cool. This too explains the patrons who as a group needed to give themselves a good shake, wake up and cry, “He doesn’t have any clothes, he really doesn’t!”

Had I been alone I might have put it down to ill-health and jet lag but the feelings at our table were universally shared and we all left disappointed at a wasted and very expensive evening. It’s a classic problem in child-rearing, the teaching profession and management; how is anyone supposed to improve when they are praised for abysmal performance.

Couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

V and I spent our final dinner in Ethiopia at the Sheraton Addis. Over dinner we chatted, trying to pin down what we found most surprising about the country. V’s random thoughts:

• Ethiopia is roughly the same size as Sweden. Population 80 million, Sweden 9 mill. Pop of Addis is 3.3 million and growing daily. Ugly city but a major centre.
• 9O% of the pop is engaged in agriculture,mostly subsistence farming.
• Lots of early ties to Jerusalem and early Christianity. The Lalibela churches were built in the 11th century by King Lalibela who had spent 20+ years in Jerusalem and wanted to replicate it in Ethiopia.
• The third wise man, Balthazar, was Ethiopian and his gift was frankincense, which is harvested here. Who knew?
• The Queen of Sheba was Ethiopian. She went to Jerusalem to visit King Solomon and had his child (!!). When that boy grew up he returned to Ethiopia with many people from Jerusalem, who stayed here. He also brought the Arc of the Covenant, which is still here, in Axum. (Doubt if the Israelis would agree with that but there does seem to be some hard evidence).
• No pork anywhere in the country.
• E has the second largest donkey population in the world. China is first, but who counted? E must have the largest goat pop in the world, hands down. We watched goats being sold in the market, $20 to $25 each. Their meat goes to Saudi.
• The govt launched a 20 year plan in 2007 to become a developing country. It will be hard, the infrastructure is still underdeveloped, although cell phones do seem to work pretty well and the banking system is good, unlike Burma, which doesn’t have one at all. We see no black market for money, unlike Argentina.
• Chinese investment is everywhere. They have built all the roads in the last 5 years, built the huge new headquarters for the African Union, and most of the industrial plants, steel etc are Chinese. They are buying up Africa.
• The population is roughly equally divided between Ethiopian Orthodox Christian and Muslim. The communities are all very mixed and seem to get along well, hope that continues, but with neighbours like Sudan and Somalia, I would be worried.
• The country used to extend to the Red Sea but as a result of some historically bad decisions is now landlocked, and pays Djibouti $500K US per DAY for access to its port. Enormous when you think that the the average annual income is $250, and for many of the places that we have been that would be high. It’s a terrible drain on resources, but what is the alternative?
• No fences, herds all have a herder, often a tiny child who is smaller than the cattle…sometimes even smaller than the goats. And they all (people, goats, sheep, cattle, donkeys, dogs)wander on or across the road, all the time. Driving is a constant game of dodge ’em.
• Everybody works hard. Women and donkeys carry everything. Men tend the fields and flocks, they don’t carry.
• No private cars outside Addis.
• Ethiopia has never been colonized. It was occupied by the Italians, who left behind pasta on every menu. The battles were horrible, however and the Ethiopians finally drove them out.
• People are lovely, soft spoken, gentle and cheerful.
• Jacaranda and flame trees in bloom, amazing bougainvillea. Temp around 40C in south (HOT), mid 20s here and north.
• Addis is really the centre of everything. Every nationality in the world is at this hotel, it is the only major hotel downtown and is right next to the presidential palace. It is fascinating to speculate on all the deals that are going on, it absolutely hums.

My own thoughts in addition:

• Struck by the huge difference between the north and south of the country. North is ethnographically, culturally, climatically and geographically hugely different. Might almost be two distinct countries.
• All the major and most disruptive changes are occurring in the south. North appears more settled but in the south there is a strong sense that within 5 to 10 years it will be unrecognizable.
• Surprised at the general sense of cleanliness in the smaller towns. Undoubtedly there is litter, open puddles and broken paving stones on both sides of the road in small centres but it feels as if it would not have been any different if you had visited 100 years ago. Unlike India for example where the landscape and the small towns are littered, coated, buried under billions of plastic bags, blocking waterways, hanging from trees like obscene fruit and coating every inch of waste ground inches deep.
• Honesty of the people. I mentioned in one of my first posts that I had left a bag with a Fuji X-E2 camera and lens along with my ipad and headphones in the hotel lobby tea court. Didn’t realize what I had done for at least an hour but when I returned it had been put aside for me. I forgot my ipod in the hotel room when we checked out to travel to the south. The hotel called our travel agent to tell him that they had found it and that they would keep it for me until we returned for our last night. Pretty unusual.
• The paranoia about journalists. I have talked about my camera problems but what did not hit me until later was that on my arrival when customs were having such a hard time with my equipment, they kept asking me if the cameras took video. Fortunately, the only smart thing that I did that night was to say, No. Since every camera in the world now takes both video and stills, had I said yes I don’t think I would have seen them again as I would have been irrevocably branded as a journalist.