In a city renowned for its seafood, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a lemon or a lime. Walk up and down the length of a fish market in your neighborhood, inhaling the putrid air, and you might stop once or twice on sighting small green round things. But they are some family of orange, certainly … More No lemons in fishland.
Anyone knows better than to provoke a bride on her wedding day, and anyone knows better than to take an unauthorized picture of her. Unless you are the hired photographer, family or an invited guest, you know better. But if you are an Arab or White guest of the Addis Ababa Sheraton – one of … More Photonappers.
Somehow the staring is more tolerable when it is directed at you after you return from a place where everyone may not have thought like you but certainly looked like you, and where the stares were of a knowing nature, rather than blank and expressionless. The silliness, absurdity, even the pathetic nature of it becomes … More Look: Diaspora!
One of the ways to get to Mainland China from Hong Kong is by bus. When you exit Hong Kong and pass through customs at the border bus depot, you file into the line marked “Visitors”. A short bus ride later, when you cross over into China through Shenzhen, you file into the line marked … More Chinese Crossovers
Something about coffee. A must. A delicious authentic cupful while waiting for yet another takeoff, feeling especially exposed in the surplus personal space of a cabin now even emptier save for you, a devout African Muslim and one green-clad airline employee hitching a ride, triggers a wave of emotions. The rush of vitality such a … More Coffee Stopover
When you’re the only habesha person – a young shabbily dressed female at that – in the Business Class section of an Addis – Hong Kong flight, you’ve got some explainin’ to do. You can’t blame the airline employee who herded all the ET 608 passengers – VIP and RP alike – en masse to … More On Cloud Nine
If you’re going to be lonely it’s best to do it in a city where you know no one. To be lonely in a city where you know many, and many know you, is the worst kind of loneliness. There is no excuse for it. It is more pathetic than regular loneliness, the right kind. … More Pre
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