Dream: Federer and the slushie parlour

This dream starts on a tennis court which I don't recognise. It appears to be inside a dark hall, where visibility is quite poor. I am standing behind a stack of chairs and other random equipment. I can hear lots of conversation and laughter reverberating in the hall, but cannot see well until I manage to move around all the junk. I see a whole bunch of people standing on the court chatting and drinking champagne, everyone seems to be quite excessively happy.

Suddenly the hall is flooded with light and someone announces that the game will start in 5 minutes. People scatter everywhere until Roger Federer is the only person left standing on the court, champagne glass still in hand.

"What are you waiting for?" He says, "you'd better start cleaning up or I won't be able to play!"

I realise that my job is to be the cleaner, and I start moving things as quickly as I can. First I collect and stack the chairs, then I scoop up food scraps and serving plates, putting them in a big pile by the side.

Finally there are just a few dozen champagne glasses left. I've run out of time so Roger starts the game, running around the court and trying to jump over the glasses. I dash in and out around him, trying to collect them without tripping him up or breaking any of the glasses. It becomes increasingly difficult as he seems to move faster and faster around the court until he is practically a blur.

I manage to get everything off the court, and breathe a heavy sigh of relief. I retreat to a corner of the hall and watch the rest of the match, which Federer wins.

Afterwards he says to me, "thanks so much for getting those glasses off the court, I could have hurt myself pretty badly." I'm not really sure what to say, so I just smile. Then he says "I know just the place, let's go for a cool drink."

We walk out of the hall and step straight into what looks like Darling Harbour. Across the way from the hall is a giant gleaming slushie parlour, complete with a dozen slushie dispensers.

The slushie parlour owner welcomes us and asks which flavours we would like. Roger takes out a ridiculously large golden key and says "I have the key, so we can have the magic slushie!"

He slots the key into place, presses a button and a technicolour slushie starts streaming out, flowing everywhere all around us and surrounding us in surreal colours.

Then I wake up.

Dream: when cows are extinct

(This was the first dream I had in 2013)

In this dream, cows have become extinct all over the world, and thus milk no longer exists. I am working for the Chinese CIA-equivalent secret service, and I receive a brief on my next mission to a certain unnamed Pacific island where there is allegedly a geriatric cow still living.

I fly to the island, a tropical paradise with white sandy beaches and gently swaying coconut trees. Somewhere in a village of scattered thatch roof huts, I find a wrinkly old cow, somewhat malnourished with folds of skin hanging low. I convince the owner to give me some of its milk, which I dutifully store in an empty 2L Dairy Farmers container.

I open the brief which tells me my next instructions. I have to drink a sachet of some effervescent drink, which cleans out my gut completely and gets rid of all the acid and bacteria. Then I drink the entire 2L of milk and it's supposed to sit in my stomach until I get back to China.

Next I am flying in a plane over the ocean, and land in a place called Clare with tin-roof buildings making up the airport. My brief tells me that this is where I will receive my next instructions.

While sitting in the tin shack, a girl my age comes up to me and says "我是奶牛 (I am Dairy Cow)". I take this to be my cue and stand to greet her. She tells me that I need to regurgitate the milk for her and she will take it away, but I suddenly become afraid that she is some type of enemy and refuse. She doesn't object and instead tells me she will take me to Hu Jintao.

We get back on the plane and she sits next to me in the emergency exit row. She whispers in my ear that when the plane is skimming down to very close to the ocean, that will be our cue to open the emergency exit and jump out. A ship will be waiting below for us. As the plane gets lower and lower, I think about the consequences for the rest of the plane's passengers once we have thrown out the emergency exit window. But there's no time and we jump out.

The next thing I know, I am back in my flat having already gotten rid of the milk. The phone rings and a man says on the other end that I am in danger because someone has found out about the milk mission. He asks me who I have told about it, and I say no-one. The only person that knows about it is Dairy Cow, and I feel disappointed that she has betrayed me because I thought she was a nice person.

I go to her house, and ask her if she has told anyone. She says that she is a loner with no friends, and definitely did not tell anyone else. I suddenly get the feeling that we are being watched, and we start scouring her apartment for any taps. After searching high and low we finally spot a little black disc inside a ceiling ventilation grille.

"We have to get out of here, now we are both in danger". I say to her and we get ready to leave. 

And that is when I wake up.

Ethiopian food

I've been asked so many times since I came back from Ethiopia what I actually did there, to which my usual reply is "ate lots of food and drank lots of coffee". True I could go on about all the historical sites, but what will really stick in my mind is the food.

Injera
Where better to start than injera, the national food. Made from a grain called tef, which is only found in Ethiopia, it is served at every meal and forms the staple of Ethiopian food. I find it really strange how it's not found anywhere else, and how there is actually no way to describe it because there is no "other food equivalent" to compare it to!

 Injera with lentil stew (Top view, Addis)

Resembling a large floppy flannel (or bathmat), it looks rubbery and unappealing. Mostly it takes on a light brown or grey colour, but occasionally we found lighter injera which is meant to be of higher quality. The batter is left to ferment for several days, which accounts for the sour taste as well as the bubbles on one side.

Injera is served with the dish of your choice, usually either a stew or something fried such as what seemed to be the national favourite, tibs (fried meat). There were generally few vegetarian options, except on fasting days when it was easy to find vegetarian food. My staples were shiro (pureed chickpeas), messir wat (lentil stew) and beyanetu (a mix of everything on fasting days).
 

  Tibs, the national dish of stir fried meat (bus pit-stop)

A non-veg Beyanetu for tourists (Habesha, Gonder)

  

 The best Beyanetu ever (Seven Olives, Lalibela)

 

 Spicy fish stew (Cafe Wude, Bahir Dar)

 Raw meat, a real delicacy (random roadside pub, Babille)

 I wasn't the biggest fan of injera to start with, but soon I got used to the taste. It seemed to accompany the spices of the dishes quite well, and after a while it felt strange to go a few meals without eating injera.


Breakfast
 
Breakfast is one of my favourite meals of the day. We were so lucky to stumble across No Name cafe in Aksum, where we had the best breakfasts in Ethiopia.

Fatar is an interesting breakfast - bread, probably from the day before, is fried with berbera (a type of red spice mix) and topped with fried eggs, a little tomato, red onion and chilli. Yoghurt is poured over the whole thing and then it's all tossed together. We discovered this breakfast by watching what others were eating at No Name, and it was probably my favourite breakfast in Ethiopia.

Another common breakfast food is foul, a garlicky chickpea mash eaten with bread. The one we had at No Name had plenty of chilli added, but in Harar the special foul wasn't very spicy at all, instead accompanied by a mix of eggs, tomatoes, lentils and broad beans.

 

Special foul (random place, Harar)

In Bahir Dar we had this dish of chechebsa, like thin fried pieces of dough mixed with spices and fried egg. It reminded me of mianpian, a noodle dish eaten in north-eastern China.

Chechebsa with egg (Cafe Wude, Bahir Dar)

In Harar there was a Muslim specialty of fatira, a crispy pancake served with egg or honey (or both)

Fatira with honey (Cafe Abyssinia, Harar)

Juice
Fresh juice is such a luxury, especially in a relatively fruit-deprived country. Most of the time we bought bananas and oranges to eat, but the fruit shake joints usually had avocado, papaya and guava juice.
 

Juice house, Harar

One can get a mixed juice, where the available juices are layered. Most juices are served with lime and sometimes with this strange red syrup which I never figured out.

Mixed juice (papaya/avocado/guava), Aksum

Coffee

Most days I would have 2-3 cups of coffee, sometimes more (especially in Addis when I could visit Tomoca!) There were many antique-looking espresso machines leftover from the Italian days, and the most memorable of these aside from the one in Tomoca was the one in a dark little bar opposite Africa Hotel in Aksum. This was a rusty red number, which gleamed a little in the dark and pumped out a damn smooth espresso.

Of course, there were many opportunities to drink coffee the traditional way, with coffee brewed in a terracotta pot over hot coals, then poured into tiny cups and taken black with copious amounts of sugar (up to 1/3 of the cup). 

The coffee ceremony involves collecting the right type of grass (to bring in a sense of nature), burning special incense and the ritual preparation of the coffee. Traditionally it is also served with popcorn, which is a combination I never got used to.

 

Ambo
Last but not least, I loved sparkling water from a place called Ambo, about 50km west of Addis. Apparently the spring water here naturally flowed out of the ground with so many bubbles that even if left out overnight, it would still be bubbly the next day! I really wanted to go to Ambo to have an Ambo bath, but was told that the tap water in Ambo was flat. Disappointed, I resorted to drinking more Ambo instead.

Vegetarian friendliness
Finally, a little note on the degree of difficulty in getting vegetarian food in Ethiopia. Though I wasn't strictly vegetarian, I mostly stayed away from meat as my encounters with meat were far from appetising. Think large carcasses hanging outside restaurants from which your meal is chopped, lots of flies, non-existent refridgeration.. It was easy enough to find something vegetarian to eat, but I found the variety to be lacking on non-fasting days. There was almost always pasta with tomato sauce, and failing that, there's always shiro.

It was frustrating to see lots of vegetables in the market that just don't make it onto the menu because there was a perception that people want to eat meat when they go out to eat. Vegetables like cabbage and pumpkin hardly ever made it into restaurants, because they were considered "home food" or "poor food". Others like spinach were ubiquitously cooked with meat, and it was hard for non-Amharic speaking people to explore different options.

All up it wasn't too bad for vegetarians though - at least two days of the week (Wed & Fri) one can eat well!   

2012 ->2013

As the clock ticked into 2012, I was at Kirsty and Dev's house, where a whole bunch of us in various states of drunkenness had an all night-long water fight. It started in a semi-civilised way with water guns, then there were water bombs everywhere, and finally multiple garden hoses were dragged out. Everything was soaked and bunny Joey had to be packed away for fear of drowning. Shortly after midnight I was dumped unceremoniously in the pool by a bunch of residents, and whilst there decided that 2011 was a great year of fun!

As the clock ticked into 2013, I was struck by how different it all was. In some ways it was exactly the way it was before I went to Darwin - a quiet little gathering, lots of food and laughter.. I was happy, but at the same time I missed the randomness and craziness of 2011.

There was not very much random about 2012. I went to work, I learnt lots of things, and that was basically the end. In between I met up with friends, ate lots of food, played music and occasionally travelled. It wasn't a bad year, but it left a strange after taste... of boredom.

I need something else to happen in 2013. Bring it on.

Delirious with durian, NYE 2013