Tonight I ate at Abay. We spotted this place on the first day and made some ethnically insensitive comments about menus listing water and dirt. Afterwards, we ate pizza and felt good about ourselves.

As it turns out, Ethiopian food isn't too different from a lot of Mediterranean cuisines - think north African. My meal came on a gray pancake, and consisted of chicken breast meat in cumin and harissa, yellow split peas in some kind of savory sauce, collard greens with bits of goat cheese, and some kind of carrot-green bean mix in garlic.

What made this experience different was the lack of utensils. Thank God I ate alone, facing a wall. The ideal is that you tear off a section of gray pancake with entree on top, make a mini-burrito of it, and consume it gracefully. In practice, I found that the pancake isn't all that stable unless you tear out an entire quadrant, and the result was that I ended up with 25-50% of any food left behind in the palm of my hand. My fine cloth napkin essentially became a diaper for my face.

Thereafter, I went to Borders and picked up three books I've always wanted to read: Metamorphosis and Trial by Kafka, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn. They also had a new paperback version of Darkness at Noon by Koestler, which I read during my month in Korea but lost in the airport returning to Japan.

This unemployment stuff's not so terrible.