Life Takes You To Strange Places

This morning as I was driving to school, the windows down, the perfect Colorado Spring morning flashing by, not a cloud anywhere in the sky, it dawned on me that exactly a year before that moment I had been sitting in an interrogation room in a small country in Africa being yelled at in a completely unfamiliar language.

...

Anders and I had been looking for a Thai restaurant in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. We had been told that the food was good and the view was stunning. Food was one of the main reasons we were in the country anyway, so we thought we'd give it a try. They had pork. And wine. And beer. Which were all very difficult, if not impossible, to find in Yemen.

Anyway, we found a taxi driver who knew of the restaurant, which was shaped like an air-traffic control tower and set atop a lovely hill in the middle of the city. As we arrived we noticed that there weren't any lights on, so we figured it was closed and we ought to leave. Before we could turn around and go, we were surrounded by guys in fatigues with Kalashnikovs pointed at our heads.

Our taxi driver got out and started to talk to them. A look of alarm spread on his face. Anders began to get rather agitated (the beer he'd had before we left didn't help matters) and wanted to get out of the taxi and figure out what was going on. While our driver spoke a few words in English, none of the rest of them did, and they didn't speak Italian either (it had been an Italian colony, so it wasn't a terribly unreasonable thing to expect), so even if he had remained calm and not had to be forced back in the taxi, he wouldn't really been able to figure anything out anyway.

After yelling, arguing, and looking worried for nearly an hour on top of the hill, our driver was "permitted" to take us down to the police station. Once there, we were again kept in the taxi with guns pointed at us as our driver attempted to explain what was going on to the police. We still had no idea what going on. All we knew was there were a lot of guns and Anders needed to pee.

Probably another hour later we were led out of the taxi to a small, windowless room in the police station. A man came in and started yelling at us in the local language (I can never remember it's name). We just looked at him blankly. Eventually they brought in someone who spoke some English and we were able to explain that we were looking for a restaurant we had heard about from a friend.

The English speaker grinned for a second, then got a stern look on his face and shouted something to the guards that must have meant, "Get them out of here," because we were released with apologies and sheepish smiles.

As we were leaving it was explained to us that because of the upcoming Eritrean National Day celebration, the military had commandeered the restaurant as a lookout for Ethiopian terrorists. They had been instructed to arrest anyone who approached the place, nevermind the fact that a blonde American girl and a drunk Norwegian weren't likely to be doing reconnaissance for anyone, much less Ethiopian terrorists.

Over drinks later in the evening, we reflected that although it was not quite the night we had planned, at least we got an interesting story out of it.