One last good bye, so long and thanks for all the fish! :-)

Dear Reader

After a loooooooooooong journey we made it home last night. There was a problem with the plane in Dubai and it delayed us by almost three hours. That delay caused us to miss our connecting flight from Frankfurt to Zurich and we had to wait until 4.30pm for seats on a flight.

Once in Zurich the roads home were so busy that the normal drive of half an hour took more than one hour. Zurich is hosting the annual ‘Street Parade’ and there are an expected one million people in the city. Some of them come by car…

Anyway, we got home, eat something small and collapsed into our beds. No muezzin disturbed our sleep and so we did sleep until there was no more sleep in us. The week-end will be spent with unpacking, laundry, calling friends and family and generally getting ready for school and work which restarts on Monday.

It has been a great experience to visit Somaliland. It will take time to digest everything and to sort through the pictures and chose the ones that will go into our Somaliland photobook. We’ve made some new friends which we are going to miss a lot. But then again, that’s what skype, facebook and all the others are for, right?

 

the last meal in Dubai we took at the Mawal,

 a Lebanese restaurant beside the Hotel

(please note the glass with Araq!!!)

 

the food was outstanding and so was dessert...

 

...couldn't resist

 

:-)

 

thank god we enjoyed a wonderful meal,

otherwise I would have gone completely mad

waiting for 4h at the gate C15 without food or water

 

leaving luxuriously decadent Dubai

 

what will happen to all that when they run out of oil?

 

flying into the morning - I love that

 

over Germany and...

 

...close to Frankfurt...

 

...just before touching down

 

Thank you for following our blog, for your likes and comments. It was a pleasure having you watch.

All the best!
Liana, Salomé and Angelika

 

 

PS: thanks to more and stronger drugs that were prescribed to me by the wonderful doctors Said and Shoukri and with the help and good advise of wonderful Pharmasist Barakat, I managed to ignore the pain in my knee almost always. I will take care of that next week when meeting with the orthopaedic surgeon.

Back in Dubai

Dear reader

back in Dubai we really struck a super ramadan end-deal for the day at one of the *****Hotels of the town. We're located right across from Dubai Mall and very near to the Burj Khalifa. To be honest, at over 40° Celcius there's not much more to do than eat, drink, watch TV and sleep. We're not very interested in the mall and swimming would have been an option early morning when the water still had a humanly supportable temperature. Now, the water has approx. 32° and there are only a few kids in the pool. We're waiting for it to be 7pm so we can go and have Lebanese food for dinner. I just reserved a table...

Here are a few pics of the suite and the hotel we're at. It's called the 'Al Murooj Rotana'.

The entrance, to the left a room with two king size

beds and a full bathroom

 

the only thing to do at over 40°

and three TVs in the house :-)

 

to the right, the living/dining room from where...

 

...it leads to the master bedroom with

a HUGE bed and a full bathroom

 

the living-room also hosts a small office area

with high-speed LAN (bliss!)

 

that's the view from our balcony

 

Angelika just decided to go and have a dip in

the pool, I was prepared to swim also but that

water is too hot for me, I could not function

anymore afterwards

 

 

I'll sleep a bit now and then go for dinner and then pack up again for the airport and then fly to Frankfurt and then on to Zurich and then take a ride home. I'm sort of between places, missing the one I have just left behind and looking forward to the one I call home.

 

There will be one last blog-entry this week-end to wrap-up. Until then - Eid Mubarak, everyone!

Impressions of Somaliland children

Dear Reader

you have been informed earlier that the TERRE DES FEMMES fotographer, Frank, will join us here in Hargeisa for about 9 days. The purpose of his work here is the idea for a campaign for 2014. Since the details are not yet finalised, there is not more information I can give you at this point. Only this much; for a real good campaign we need real good and professional picture material. This is why Frank was here.

With the help of Edna we were able to get in contact with a number of local NGOs and women and girls which we would have never been able to meet with AND take pictures of otherwise. Here you cannot just go out and ask women/girls for interviews and pictures. Aside from the fact that mainly men and boys are sitting around in tea-shops. Also, some people can get quite aggressive when they see a camera.

Anyway, we managed to organise a lot of sessions with women but in the end we had too few pictures of girls. Here, Khadija and Hassan, a couple with their three Kids living in Bern, were able to help out. They too, are spending their vacation here in Hargeisa, their hometown. We were in contact in Switzerland already so I knew where to find them here. We have been in contact since the first week of our arrival here and have spent several days together, among others the 1st of August. Khadija spread the word in her neighbourhood that all the girls shall come out to play and we will be taking pictures. And they came. Unforunately about 50 boys came too and they are much more eager to be fotographed. When we separated the girls from the boys, it took all but 5 minutes until the boys surrounded the 15 or so girls and scared them. We had to relocate the girls away from the boys so we could relax them and play with them and Frank could do his Job. Thanks god the sun played on our team and the afternoon was a full success.

I took a few pics myself from afar, here's the result.

we had the girls rounded-up by a tree...

 

...when the boys could no longer wait and moved in

  

it was quite an event for the girls

 

those two kept sticking together throughout the event...

 

...just like those two

 

the boys are mostly running...

 

...chasing each other

 

this one was a particularly shy girl,

she would not come out from behind the bushes

 

while he could not get close

enough to the camera

 

Greetings!

Liana

:-)

Laas Geel - The place where camels are watered

Dear Reader

we made it to the biggest attraction here in Somaliland - aside from the Edna Adan University Hospital - to the cave painting site of Laas Geel. While the locals knew about the painting forever, the site was discovered for the world to know by a French team in 2002 and then analised and officially listed as the oldest and best preserved cave paintings in all of Africa in 2003. The pictures show mainly people, cows and dogs and are between 5000 - 9000 years old!
It makes me wonder what else lies undetected in that dry and hot land just waiting for us to find it. If people then stopped at this site and stayed long enough to paint all these pictures, there must have been others staying in other caves painting other pictures. No?

Please read here the facts and figures about the site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laas_Gaal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Somaliland

It was mine and Salomé's wish to go there with our friends Barakat and Andala from Ethiopia.. Edna supplied the car and driver from her own hospital staff - and what a driver he is! - and the mandatory security guard from the military. That's as many as we can stuff into one 4x4.

Since we did not have time to organise the tickets and permissions in advance - Thursday afternoon and Friday the ministries are closed - we had to start this morning with a visit to the ministry of tourism. While the driver was inside organising the tickets, we were asked to step out of the car. I thought we're in for an interrogation as to what we wanted in Laas Geel with two Ethiopian men. But I was lead to a table and chair and very politely asked to sign the ministry guest book. Somewhat relieved I wrote something nice into it and signed, then asked Salomé to sign also.
Sitting there, writing a few words, the man who called me to sign the book looked at me and with a big smile and a supporting arm-gesture said: oh, you are very fat! I had to laugh out loud. You must know that fat ladies are considered rich and healthy and good for a lot of babies. Well, usually when I tell them I have two daughters and not a child more, they look quite disappointed. :-) Nonetheless, their enthusiasm for fat ladies warms my heart...

We returned home around 5pm, tired but happy after a fun day. Here are a few pictures about our trip to Laas Geel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the man just can't stop jumping,

he's got energy for at least two more :-)

the weather was perfect, hot but windy

and in this cave I could have stayed for a long time

our army guard was dead serious all the way home

isn't it beautiful here?

at one point, there must have been more greens...

...to live on, otherwise people could not have lived here...

 

...and painted cows and dogs and such.  

those two are guarding the place...

(is it me or does it say ARAFAT on his socks?)

and making sure neither funny Swiss people nor...

...funny Ethiopian people will wreck anything

 

but look at them - all happy and...

 

...smiling and genuinly having a good time

looking down on the other side of the hill

it's a dry and barren land indeed

 

can you see that there must have been a river here once?

our Casanova...

 

 

...and the three Musketeers 

 

 

 that's about the only Thing that grows in abundance.

  

the Gods must have played a game of 'rock-throwing'

and then left everything and never came back

 

out of nohting this tree grows along the pile of rocks

back down at the station we had a little pick-knick underneath a big tree...

 

 

...posed as Ethiopians and...

 

...signed the guest-book! 

 

The Muezzin just said 'Salaam Ualeikum'

We are saying Ualeikum Salaam (and the rest of the response which I can never understand)!