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There's Good, and Then There's Good
I play a lot of tennis, as I’ve detailed. My failures are apparent, but as I said I’ve
worked awfully hard on my game. I’m a
totally different player than I was when we first arrived here in Addis,
entirely for the better. I play
anywhere from three to five times per week.
Tennis is also the only activity I’ve ever taken up
seriously in which I know full well that I have a ceiling, and a relatively low
one at that. I’m a very solid
recreational player, but no more, and I can never be any more.
A few weeks ago my friend Brian and I were at a local tennis
club for a tournament doubles game (we got to the semis, ultimately, which was
pretty cool). After our match, we were
enjoying a beer and watching a couple of other guys play. They were very, very good. One, in fact, was pretty much hitting the
ball harder and with more action and accuracy than I ever do. I’d venture a guess that if we were to play
three sets, I’d lose 6-0, 6-0, 6-0, and the vast majority of those games would
be scoreless for me—I’d only score when he accidentally hit the ball into the
net or made an unforced error of another type.
Completely and totally out of my league.
We found out later that he is the top rated player in
Ethiopia. The best player in this
country. Clearly, a stud.
And yet….there is not a world in which that guy could ever
qualify for any big international tournament.
The idea that he’d play at, say, the French Open is comical. It would never happen. And even if he slipped in somehow, he’d get
beaten in the first round, probably worse than he would beat me. Against one of the truly, truly elite
players like Federer or Nadal or Djokovic he’d be lucky to score any points at
all, because those guys wouldn’t even give him the benefit of unforced
errors. I watched a women’s French Open
match last night, and it really hit me that every single shot they hit back and
forth is harder and more precise than any shot I’ve ever hit. The men are positively scary to watch.
See, in Scrabble—to take the most obvious example—it was
conceivable that I could have become a competitive international player. I once played the seventh ranked player in
the world, and I played another time against a guy who is now the fifth ranked
player in the world. I lost both games,
but neither were humiliating, and in one of them I was even ahead for a
while. Given some tile luck I could
actually win—I’ve beaten multiple top-100 players on multiple occasions. I was ranked in the top 200 in the world when we were in Dubai.
But in tennis? I’m
nobody. I’m probably not even one of the top 200
players in Ethiopia, maybe not top 500.
Unlike Scrabble, I can’t even really grasp the way the game is played at
the top levels. The amazing thing is that
I don’t have a problem with that. I am
able to enjoy my own progress, and make some comparisons to the people I play
with or see playing regularly. But it
nonetheless is interesting how strict the hierarchy is, and how firm the limit
is for guys like me.
The place I play most often is the Greek Club, and there is
a very nice local guy who is formerly one of the best players in Ethiopia and
now coaches there. He’s made it his
project to take some local kids and turn them into tennis players. He gets money donated, and lobbies on their
behalf to get them into big tournaments (they just got back from Germany, for
instance) and he coaches them relentlessly.
He also makes sure that they go to school, that they get food,
etcetera. Great project.
Two of his young kids are phenomenal. An eleven year old boy and a twelve year old
girl. They’ve each won the East Africa
championships and they apparently cleaned up in Germany, which ups their ITF
ranking and gives them a chance to do more.
Brian played the girl and lost 6-2, 6-0. She’s twelve! This puts
all of it in some perspective. Can
these kids become serious international players, if one puts the resource
disadvantages aside? Maybe. Maybe.
They’re already better than I will EVER be. WAY better. But on the
international circuit, they likely will end up as also-rans. Either way, it demonstrates how big the gap
is between the recreational-but-serious player and the truly competitive
player.
I’d destroy those kids in Scrabble, though. They wouldn’t even know what hit them.
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| Addis Ababa Street Scenes--Signs Edition
We're on the homestretch here in Addis. We depart roughly July 20, headed back to the US for about a year. I am very excited about it. However, this post isn't about that. I'll write about it later.
One of the things we've learned is that having a lot of pictures of the place we've lived is important. I still look back fondly (mostly) at the pics we have of Dubai and Tunis. Knowing this, Melissa recently went out with one of our good friends and took a hell of a lot of pictures of Addis.
Part of this is certainly anticipatory nostalgia. But another part is to be able to show pictures to people and say "Can you believe this?"
So over the course of several posts I'll be putting up pictures of Addis. This first edition is only pictures of some of the finest commercial signs in Addis--and thus, the world. I'll post without comment for now, but I'm 100% sure that you're going to have some comments once you see these....
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| Trip to Harar
We spent the better part of last week on a driving trip to Harar, which is about 8 driving hours east of Addis, in the direction of Somalia. It was a nice drive, but we've become accustomed to the fact that all the drives in Ethiopia are nice.
Harar is a city of long history, which I won't recount here, but you can read about it here if you'd like. Ethiopia guidebooks generally gush about Harar; it's a unique city here for many reasons. It's almost entirely Muslim, it's essentially a city-state, and the old city is contained inside walls. There are narrow streets--only a couple of roads in town can be driven through, so one walks everywhere. Thick with atmosphere and all that.
Furthermore, Harar is one of the centers of the chat (qat, or gat depending upon where you're at) scene. Chat, if you don't know, is a leaf with mild narcotic effects. You chew the leaf. For hours, apparently.
I pretty much thought Harar sucked. It was certainly different from most Ethiopian cities insofar as you could walk everywhere, and it looked different. There were some interesting places, houses and whatnot. But there were some problems. For one thing, chat addicts (chat is legal here) pretty much lie around in the street. If you watch The Wire, it's kind of like Amsterdam in Season 3. Not that bad, of course, but depressing. Some of the streets are very nicely paved with stones. Others are basically paved with human and animal waste. The sewage system is somewhere between nonexistent and terrible, so there is a faint (occasionally strong) odor of feces. And I felt that the hassle level was high. Very high. Lots of locals yelling "farengo!" at us (that's the local dialect for "foreigner"--elsewhere in Ethiopia, it's "farenji").
Here are some street scenes:
One cool thing in Harar: the hyena man. This dude comes out every night and feeds wild hyenas by hand, and you can help him out. Hyenas are the second largest predator in Africa, and they're kind of scary. So feeding them as your job? Wacky. But Hararis have a longstanding relationship with the hyena--the walls even have holes in them so the hyenas can come in at night and clean up the streets, which they do to some effect. As our guide put it, "it's only too bad they don't eat plastic." Anyway, Melissa and I fed the hyenas, and then--in an act of unconscionable parenting--Mercedes stepped up as well.
Harar was likely our last trip in Ethiopia. Glad we saw it, but I'll be perfectly OK with never going back.
After Harar, we stopped over on the way back in the Afar region of Ethiopia. We stayed at a lodge in the middle of freaking nowhere--check out the approach to the lodge:
And our hut....
 Afar is also an interesting place--in short, the people here are kind of wild and violent, nomadic. The men, at least historically, used to have to kill and castrate another man in order to pass into true manhood. Which is, of course, awesome. The word in driving through Afar is that if you hit one of their livestock with your car, to either be prepared to pay a hell of a lot of money or to drive like a maniac to get away before they kill you. Sweet! Anyway, the girls, Reeve in particular, became completely enamored of these guys; you'd see them walking around with sticks and AK-47s. Reeve would say "Look! It's an Afar warrior! Mommy, do not hit his cow!" The Afar warriors are now legendary in her mind. As is the hyena man--today on the way to school she kept talking about how she is going to marry the hyena man so she can be a hyena woman. Ah, aspirations.
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| Miscellaneous Notes
A few things rolling around in my head worth mentioning in brief:
1. My birthday was a week and a half ago, and I had a couple of emails from friends wondering why I hadn't mentioned it on the blog. In short, I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of this birthday. Thirty-seven! I've been almost indescribably excited about finally reaching that magical age. I can recall pestering my parents about it very early on; I have specific memories of asking my mother when I would FINALLY be thirty-seven years old, and her replying, "Only 35 more years. Now put your diaper back on." In any case, I feel like a new man. If you've already passed thirty-seven, you know what I'm talking about. If you've yet to achieve the stature and gravitas that comes with being thirty-seven, you're going to have to trust me: it's the single greatest thing that's ever happened to me in my entire life.
2. Good article here in the international issue of Newsweek about driving in Africa, with specific references to Ethiopia. The statistics in the piece are difficult to get your mind around. I, of course, see it every single day. Just today I sideswiped some dude with my mirror because he decided to wander into the traffic circle just as I was turning right. I didn't stop: mirrors are not worth stopping for and he was clearly surprised but unhurt. I was going very slowly.
3. I'm so sick of the Clinton campaign I could vomit. Every day that she decides to help McCain out by acting like a complete ass about Obama serves to tarnish whatever legacy she and Bill have. Appalling.
4. Clearly, I only had two real things to say.
5. I like pie.
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| Kansas Jayhawks, 2008 National Champions
After a hell of a lot of good Kansas teams have gone down in flames over the last 20 years, at last my Jayhawks won the national championship by beating a Memphis team that was at least twice as good as I had given them credit for prior to the tournament. Quite possibly the most exciting championship game I can recall watching, I thought the game was well and over with 2 minutes to go. But Memphis has been a terrible free throw shooting team all year, and it finally bit them in the ass.
Bill Self tried to give it away by idiotically going to a zone defense after the man-to-man had been smothering Memphis for 33 minutes, but it all worked out in the end.
I got up at 4 AM today to watch; I feel completely great now, five hours later. We'll see how I feel later. For now, though, Cloud Nine, baby.
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