pictures?

I have no idea if this will work... here goes!

OMG IT'S WORKING! how exciting. I've attempted to upload pictures before, and it never works! So, anyway. Per my moms request. Here's me today on a boda boda. Let's see if I can do more!

YES! this is really working. Here is me feeding giraffes on our last day in Kenya! They are slobbery with long black tongues and are constantly drooling. They remind me a lot of my friend Alfonso!

So it turns out I grabbed Lisa's camera instead of mine, so I only have pics she took... we have identical cameras. NO JOKE. So these might be of only me. But we can do her tomorrow (that's what she said)!

This is this guy in Nairobi who we visited who makes wire toys! It was for a Ten Thousand Villages assignment. We visited at his home and took a ton of pictures! He had a tiny baby. Which I enjoyed.

Here's Lisa and I at Lake Nkuru (Kenya), where we saw a billion flamingos in one lake (it smelled exactly as you'd think it would)

This is what we rode around in for three days for our safari in Masai Mara! Sweet ride.

TOLD YOU. A BILLION.

Look at those hippos! Safaris are kind of boring. You just drive around and around looking for things that are really hard to see, and every once in a while you see them. Seeing them is cool, but driving around is really boooooooring. To pass the time I would try to imagine the animals singing pop songs. Ostriches singing Justin Timberlake's SexyBack is pretty amusing during an all day bus ride.

Paul on a boda boda today in Kampala!

OK, I'll post some movie pics, cos Lisa is our official still photographer, so she has a ton on her camera! We're off today, but tomorrow we meet with one of the basket weavers at her home, to get a sense of her space. Monday, we start a run of shooting that should last pretty much until we leave, with maybe a few days off here and there...

An example of the amazing baskets that Uganda Crafts sells.

Shooting on Friday, when the artisans come to sell their baskets to Betty (she's the one in the pink). I'm awesome at holding the reflector.

Here's Dorothy, who we're visiting tomorrow. We did this series of slightly slow motion portraits in front of the brick latrine. They look really awesome, if a bit "allergy commercial". The women were so excited about doing them though, which is an excellent sign of things to come!

Here's us shooting them.

This was our first interview with Betty. We shot it against a white wall... mistake? I hope not!

Here's Betty. She is really great. So smart, and funny and an amazing business woman. She made us the most amazing meal the day we interviewed her. It was EPIC. Like 15 different dishes.

I just think this is a cute picture. Paul and I are working really good together, so far. He is the yin to my yang.

Well. I am so glad that worked. I tried to do this once before, and it was such an epic fail I couldn't get back on the internet for a few days after. Because I was so FRUSTERATED! I hope when I hit "publish post" it actually works. Fingers crossed...

beginnings...

Paul got here Tuesday, and brought with him an amazing amount of gear. A whole SUITCASE full of drives, and another one full of more drives. And that's not even including the camera. We met him at the airport with a sick sign that read "UGANDA WELCOMES THE HONORABLE PAUL B. YEE". We made it in Pallisa, a small (so small) town we stopped in on the way to Kampala. Lisa used to live there so we visited with a friend of hers which was fun. But since there wasn't much else to do there, we spent a lot of time watching satellite TV and making the sign.

ANYWAY, filming went well yesterday. Betty is really comfortable in front of the camera, and has picked up on how things are going to work over the next few weeks. We have a really loaded schedule already that includes visiting her mom and some of her 28 odd kids (10 biological), visiting artisans, and seeing how these amazing baskets are made! Yesterday we did a long interview and she showed us around her compound. This included hiking up a huge hill which wasn't easy for her (she's disabled from a childhood disease) or for Paul (he fell flat on his butt, but very gracefully).

She also had her family cook us lunch, and it was the best yet in Uganda. I have to say, I'm not a huge fan of Ugandan food. In Pallisa we had our choice of beef or chicken, neither of which was very palatable. Lucky for us, Betty grows all her own food on her land and her family rarely eats meat, as they have access to so many fresh fruits and vegetables. While I don't think I'd ever go searching out matoke (steamed plantains... sort of the consistency of mashed potatoes, but with a sour flavor), she served up the best I've had yet.

Today we have the day off... which is good since it's been storming all morning, but we'll be back at it tomorrow morning... 6AM!

Ethiopia highlights

Hello Everyone -- As Erin has mentioned, Ethiopia's internet is extremely slow. So here is my belated post on my highlights of Ethiopia as we've just arrived in Nairobi!

Navigating Addis has given Erin and me plenty of entertainment (and transportation adventures seems to be a recurring theme of our journey). One of our more ridiculous taxi rides happened on the way back from dinner one night -- we negotiated a fair price with the driver and hopped into the cab. About 10 minutes later our taxi sputtered to a stop on the side of a highway. After many failed attempts at restarting the engine our taxi driver got on his cell phone and called a friend. A few minutes later a new taxi pulled up and our first driver hustled us over to the new taxi. After a few confused minutes of figuring out what to do about payment for the first driver and trying to negotiate how much the second driver was going to charge we finally settled into our new taxi, realizing that our first taxi driver was actually offering to give his entire fare to the second driver. Lo and behold two seconds after our second taxi started up the hill it too conked out. By this point Erin and I were starting to wonder if this wasn't some kind of scam... but finally, after a few more confused minutes our first taxi driver walked up the hill and procured a third taxi for us. He was an absolute professional -- didn't take a cent for himself and negotiated our fare with the third driver so that we didn't get cheated on the price... and of course we felt very guilty for even thinking that he was trying to cheat us in the first place.

Navigating on foot has also had its fair share of challenges as well, despite our purchase of an excellent German map of the city. Addis would do well to assign names and numbers to its streets if it wishes to make things easier for tourists (and locals as well), but there is a certain charm in finding your way through the city like a scavenger hunt. Erin and I spent almost an entire hour scouring a 5 block radius, winding up and down a posh gated community of mostly international embassies looking for an elusive Thai restaurant that had advertised at our hotel. Their marketing campaign was ubiquitous and actually quite good except for the fact that they don't have an actual address, so all of their fliers have to make do with cryptic references to nearby landmarks and poorly drawn maps that kept us hunting for quite some time. But if there's one thing that Erin and I most always agree on, it is that a good meal is worth the hunt. We persevered and had some remarkably good Pad See Ew.

If Erin has not already mentioned it, Ethiopian food is not my favorite. It has been interesting to be here during the fasting period for lent because it means that meat is basically nonexistant on the menus. It has actually made ordering quite easy because usually the only dish available in local restaurants is the traditional fasting plate -- injera with a variety of vegetarian samplings on top. I actually don't mind the flavor of the vegetables, but something about injera just doesn't do it for me. And after two and a half weeks of fasting plates I'm more than ready to move on to Kenya for more culinary variety...

The biggest highlight of the trip for me was our 3-day, 22 mile trek in the Simien Mountains where we saw wild baboons, tons of beautiful birds and some incredible scenery. The mountains are breathtaking -- literally and figuratively. At an altitude of 4,000 m and with very steep inclines the hike was very challenging. Even at our campsite, the pit latrine was all the way at the bottom of a very steep hill that always left me huffing and puffing at the top and certainly made me think twice about whether I really had to go to the bathroom or not. And the water taps were in the complete opposite direction down another steep hill. Erin can attest to the fact that I was the only one among our 6-person trekking group that opted not to hike out of my way to take the coldest shower ever and preferred to wallow in the grittiness for our 3 days in the wild...

The vistas were absolutely incredible -- it looked a lot like the Grand Canyon. The biggest difference by far was the remoteness of the Simiens compared to the Grand Canyon. When you go to the Grand Canyon its hard not to be within earshot or eyesight of another tourist for even a minute. In the Simiens we did an entire 16km hike without encountering another soul (and then we landed in a Village in the absolute middle of nowhere, which was a bit surreal). In some ways its amazing to have that level of preservation, but it also made me a little sad to think how few Ethiopians ever actually see the Simiens, aside from those who actually live here. It really brought home for me the difference between a culture that can afford leisure and one that cannot....

Which brings me to my final impression of Ethiopia. Throughout the country -- in both the city and the rural areas -- the one constant refrain that I keep coming back to is how incredibly hard life is here. Along most of the countryside you see endless fields full of people tending to their crops with extremely manual and primitive tools, maybe a mule if they're lucky. Women will walk for miles with a load of firewood on their backs and in search of the nearest water source. Its nothing for children to hike up and down a very steep mountain a few kilometers (without water!) to get to and from school each day. On our second day here I encountered two people actually bathing in puddles of rainwater on the streets of Addis -- it certainly makes me think twice when I'm hoping for a hot water shower to think about not having one at all.

Ethiopian Food is BOMB: Final thoughts on Ethiopia

My dad often says, that Ethiopian food is the only food that consistently makes him ill. He HATES it, and if you know my dad, you know that hating any kind of food is a rare occurrence.

I've never felt the same way, although I've met many who have. I think what it really boils down to is: injera is kind of weird. I'll cop to that. It's served cold, it's kind of got a spongy texture, it's slightly sour, when it gets wet it falls apart which is obnoxious because you have to use it as your fork, spoon and knife... I get it.

But, despite it's faults, I've enjoyed our traditional feasting here in Ethiopia.

We happened to time our trip to coincide with Ethiopian Lent. Ethiopians take their Christianity very seriously - compared to a lot of Ethiopian Christians, Americans are just phoning it in. For Lent pretty much no one eats meat (fish doesn't count as meat though... go figure... it's the Faith Gaskins method of vegetarianism.. ZING). There will be meat listed on menus, but if you order it, you'll be told it's not available.

So that pretty much left us with the Ethiopian Fasting Plate. Sounds pretty awful, but in reality it's not at all awful. It's basically a big round of injera topped with all these little vegetarian salads. The mainstays are a kind of spiced, curried lentil, a cooked cabbage salad, shiro (which is the only food I will admit is really trifling. disgusto. it's basically chick pea sauce, but there's nothing in the sauce, and the sauce itself kind of tastes like glue or paste or something), curried potatoes and carrots and then whatever else is available. Sometimes a sort of coleslaw like salad, sometimes a green salad, sometimes something unidentifiable but delicious.

Also this huge meal costs the equivilant of about $1.50 USD. It's like the ultimate dollar menu! Really cheap, really tasty, really filling.

They also serve injera for breakfast here, called firfir. It's literally yesterdays torn up injera stir fried with some awazi sauce (super spicy) or some other sauce... sometimes the dreaded shiro. It's pretty good, although I'll admit I go for eggs when available.

While the Italian colonizers were only here for like, five years, it was enough time for the Ethiopians to take the best of what they had to offer: pizza, pastries and aqua con gas. We've only been in Kenya for 1 day and I already miss Ambo! They have it everywhere, it's just seltzer water, but it's a nice constant in a country who's landscape and people change so dramatically from region to region.

The pizza in Ethiopia is GREAT, and every other storefront is a pastry shop. Granted, you can point at any slice of cake, no matter what it's shaped like or what color it is, it will turn out to be lemon cake - but that's beside the point.. it's GOOD! And it's everywhere. Donuts too! (Which reminds me of a very off color joke told to me years ago: What's the easiest way to exterminate the entire population of Ethiopia? Throw a donut off a cliff. I HOPE YOU'RE NOT LAUGHING).

Also, to make my mom proud, we found the only Thai restaurant in Addis, and ate there our last day. Guess what? It was really good. Everything tasted authentic and we were joined in the dining room by two tables of Thai people, so you know it must have been the real deal. It was even better than the Thai food we had in Cairo. And significantly more spicy than Thai food served stateside.

So all the jokes about food and lack of food in Ethiopia are totally off the mark, the food here is great, I didn't get sick once, and not EVERYTHING is hellishly spicy. I have a feeling I might even miss the Ethiopian fasting plate here in Kenya... We'll see! Tomorrow we're headed for the coast!