News from the North

Let us consider, then, the various modes of transport here in Ethiopa. First, of course, there is one's feet; very popular, if largely due to necessity. A few people go barefoot, though most wear sandals. Earlier today I followed an elderly man with one foot sandalled and one bare for some time; we moved at the same pace, across gravel-dusted tarmac, though I was booted. Well-dressed women wear heels. And in Addis (though not here, so far as I can tell) running shoes are also very popular. Running is the national sport. At 6AM joggers rove all about Addis Ababa. Some are portly office-warrior types. Some are good. Some are really, really good . The best of the best - Haile Gerbreselassie (sic? Internet too slow to Google), the world marathon champion and record-holder - is Ethiopian. Here in Axum, the bicycle is also very popular. This surprised me. The Chinese influence again, perhaps? It's not exactly Shanghai 1997 and its river of bicycles, but I don't think I've bee...

* It is official: Sub-Saharan Africa is freaking booming . I mean, I know the numbers have been saying that for some time; Addis Ababa certainly feels like a boomtown, cranes and construction sites everywhere, and even so the people I talked to there lamented about how Kenya is leaving them behind; but here I am in faraway Axum, an ancient city of some 40,000 near the Eritrean border - and when all construction projects underway here have finished, they will have, at a conservative estimate, quintupled the number of multi-story buildings in town. Not to mention all the roadwork underway. Of course, who knows how long some of these projects may have languished half-complete? And yet even so their very existence says something, and I heard hammering coming from the couple that I passed... * The boom definitely has something to do with massive Chinese investment. The blanket in my current hotel is a "Jin Quo Han" (sic?) blanket. My internet connection in Lalibela was establishe...