I'm on mission again, which is a direct calque from the French and which sounds a lot more exciting in English than in the original. Although I suppose if it were
really exciting then I wouldn't be able to blog about it. No-one else is here yet and the conference doesn't start til Tuesday, so I'm at a loose end, not doing anything except sitting in the hotel room not catching up on sleep and blogging.
I travelled here on Ethiopian Airlines. For a child of the 80s, Ethiopia means Band Aid, Bob Geldof and 'eat your carrots, there are starving children in...'. At the time, I could never understand why my Mum wouldn't agree to physically send the carrots where they might be appreciated a bit more. Imagine my consternation when the cabin crew came round to collect the dinner trays. I almost apologised over the tell-tale carrots lying sheepishly uneaten in the gravy.
On landing, we were treated to tantalisingly spectacular views over the plains and mountains surrounding Addis Ababa. Unfortunately the rest of my Ethiopian experience consisted of dozing in the business lounge, in spite of the interest piqued by leaflets depicting pyramids, markets and ancient ruins.
And now here I am, in a rather different country that is not Ethiopia. I have inadvertently managed to do more or less everything I need to do to catch malaria: opening the windows on arriving in the hotel room (it's an automatic reflex, I just wanted to see the view), walking outside by the pool, sitting by the pool after dark eating pizza (because that's where the hotel bar food was). There's a winged insect that looks like a fly in my bathroom. I hope it is a fly. In a few weeks' time I expect I will know whether it was or not. And I accidentally drank from a glass of coke with ice, before I'd really had time to think about it, so I'm clearly well on the way to a nice bout of tummy trouble, if not full-blown cholera.
If I manage to survive all that, I may even take some photos...
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