Yesterday was a weird day. I slept in on account of turning off my alarm and accidentally falling back asleep. Thankfully, I naturally woke back up around half past six and was able to get to work on time (I did skip breakfast however).
My morning was boring but rewarding. As I go about learning new technologies I am struck with two opposing forces. I feel regret for not having learned these earlier, and a touch of frustration that none of my college courses thought it important to teach these things. And also some anger with how slow my progress is moving. But then I also feel achievement and accomplishment from the learning I’m doing and skills I’m acquiring. “If not now, then when?” I keep telling myself when I feel unmotivated.
So, walking home for lunch (which I normally skip, but today was grateful for seeing as I had missed breakfast) I remember feeling quite strange. Both anger and pride mixing within me. However, hunger became my dominant feeling and I let that steer my mood. I stopped at a bakery, grabbed a loaf of bread, and went home to make myself a nice egg sandwich.
I got back to work around an hour later and, with the rest of my day, was able to finish a key piece of a project I’m currently working on.
After work I got my dinner supplies—some potatoes and steak—and went home. Myself and my buddy here, the butcher, have gotten pretty good at our routine. Right around 5pm he finds me standing in front of his shop and knows without asking that I want a fourth kilo of beef cut up into small chunks. I also think that he might have been scamming me the first week or so I was here, because ever so slowly he has been charging me less and less for the same amount of beef. I was fine paying two dollars for over half a pound of beef, but I’m not one to stop his guilt from lowering that price even further.
After dinner, with nothing much to do other than sit and contemplate, I found myself feeling very sad to be leaving Ethiopia prematurely. As well as my day went, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing. Like a grand experience or some extraordinary event to remember my time in Hawassa by. And more so, it wasn’t that it was missing, but that I had lost my way in searching out such experiences. I chalked it up to falling into a routine, but this morning I’m still left feeling a little unsatisfied. Thankfully I still have five full day left and two of them a weekend.