This is what trying to get a SIM card on a Saturday morning. In Addis Ababa.
This is what I'm hoping will be my next car. Not this exact one, but this model.
There is no happier day for the expat than that of the Care package. Especially when it has BACON!
Look what Brandon and Shannon hath wrought. Namely, Sienna, who has the bluest eyes of any baby of all time.
Pizza! In the DRC. I was just happy to have pizza there. Broke the monotony. Sometimes its kind of sad what you are resorting to for comfort in some of these places.
OK so this is from when I was back in the US, while I was up hanging out in MT with Care's family. Her sister and the younglings needed a ride to the Billings airport. Billings has a Cabela's, which is basically like a Wal-Mart sized hunting / fishing / camping store, which is basically awesome. The Billings one has a 25,000 gallon fish tank *inside the store* and this is that tank. It has all the local species of fish, and it is awesome.
My first proper meal back in the US - from an awesome Mexican joint in downtown SF. God bless Mexico.
Roadside snacks for sale in rural Malawi. They are mice, and you eat them whole. A delicacy!
This was at my hotel in Blantyre, Malawi. This guy was a solid 40 feet above the pavement, sawing off a limb on which he had the ladder leaned up against. With no rope or harness or anything. We had to leave for our meetings so I couldn't stay around to watch him die.
Kind of blurry but this is Sheila and Debbie, the latter of which has forsaken us Nairobite Americanos, and is missed.
Enough said.
OK so this one and the next one are from Accenture's ill-fated bid to bank all of their marketing on the media-elusive Tiger Woods, who I always ALWAYS knew had a dark secret waiting to burst onto the national media. Anyone that famous and that intensely private always does. Anyway, I was only able to capture a few of these in heaven-knows-which-airports when the whole scandal was blowing up, I'm sure by now Accenture's destroyed any evidence of them, but what I wouldn't pay to have one of these to hang in my garage when I some day have a garage...
Also, I think its kind of funny to play that game that people play with fortune cookies where you add the words "in bed" on the end of the Accenture tag line. Works much better post-revelation.
This one and the next two are from our massive (massive) warehouse in Harare, Zimbabwe. Used to be a tobacco warehouse. Now its a mainly food warehouse that we kind of vainly hope government officials won't show up to confiscate before we can distribute it to beneficiaries in the field.
Teton Gravity Research is one of my favorite extreme skiing video producing outfits, out of Wyoming, I believe. I saw this tire cover on the back of a car in Arusha, Tanzania. I am pretty sure I'm one of the few people in the world who's ever been to Arusha that even knows what TGR is. That group does not include the driver of this car.
Whilst in Arusha I found a nice backpackers type lodge that served a semi-American meal. It was nice to have what at least looked to be a "safe" salad. I eat a lot of "safe" salads. Its like salad roulette.
This is the motorcycle that clipped my front side panel when I was making a completely legal right turn (remember in TZ we are on the other side of the road, so that means across the oncoming lane, like a left turn in the US), with my blinker on, and this moron was buzzing down the median line taking his GF for a joyride. What ensued were accusations that he heard one of my colleagues tell me to hit him on purpose, which he apparently heard from his motorbike when all of our car windows were up. I moved my car out of the two lanes instead of leaving it blocking the busiest street in the entire town (also Arusha), which is what you're supposed to do legally while you wait for the cops to show up. I did this after photo-documenting that he moved his bike first, but to no avail - we would end up having to go to the police station, drive the cops back to the scene, be subject to endless lectures that I shouldn't have moved the car (the same one I had to bring them to the scene of the accident in), and then return the cops to the station and wait a couple of hours while they took statements for their report. I didn't insist on filing the report, they made me - I was willing to just leave with the scratch on my vehicle and pay for fixing it myself. The guy who hit me couldn't even afford proper shoe strings for his boots, and being that it was a work motorbike, he probably lost his job anyway.
Somewhere in TZ. "Mustle bound."
This was from Dagoretti School for Boys, which is outside of Nairobi. Jen and I were kind of investigating if it was "outside enough" that if we brought some of the street kids we were working with there, they might actually stay in the school instead of returning to the streets to sniff glue and beg. This is one of those glue bottles that the school kept on a shelf to remind the boys in the school where they had been, and encourage them to stay. I saw one of the boys that we were struggling to keep in a school back on the street the other day. I asked him if he'd let me take him back to the school, and he asked me for money.
This was right in front of my house in NBO. The dogs of war.
From a restaurant I had lunch at in Santo Domingo, D.R. when I got there for a weekend when I was working in Haiti. I took a lot of pictures of that weekend's explorations and have no idea where I put them. Maybe on a backup drive that caught a virus and ate all the data.
Pretty sure this is the airport in Port Au Prince.
This is the High Line Park in NYC, post-redevelopment. So in this case, I was exploring it legally, unlike the previous case. This must have been roughly August of last year when I was around for Dave's wedding.
Sometimes I look at you and wonder whether I miss friends and family more, or you. This makes me feel bad.
This was from right here in Addis, but from July-ish of last year when I was first here. The hotel we stayed in had a floor "-1." I never went to that floor for fear of ending up in a John Malkovich movie.
My first work trip after moving to Nairobi was to Uganda, where I met Ben, at a hotel restaurant where he was having lunch with some of the Save The Children folks he was working with. Why can't my organization work with Ben? Hmph.
