Addis Ababa - Part اثنان

Okay, back to where I left off the other day.

On our second day in Addis, Ryan and I both were hurting a bit from the night before. I got up before him at about 10am, so I headed over to a cafe we had went the day before and got breakfast on the roof. It was a cool place because from the roof you had a great view. When I got back Ryan had finally got up, so he ate breakfast and then we went with Jez, Anna, Tom and Ester to the Merkato. The largest open air market in Africa. We spent about three hours there, but didn't find anything we actually wanted to see. Twice these "guides", just random men who offered to help us out brought us to the same store. Pretty much like a referral. Quite annoying. Anyway, we never found the gun shops that we initially were looking for and gave up when it started to rain in the afternoon.

For dinner, all of us plus Emily went and got Italian food down the street from our hotel. You can still see a bit of the Italian influence in the country, hence are hotel was right near the "Piazza", which I'm almost positive is not a word of Ethiopian origin. After dinner, Jez and Anna took us on a great car ride up Mount Entonto where we had an awesome view of Addis all lit up at night. It was quite interesting to be driving down this dirt road, pumping Johnny Cash in this old school Mercedes, with everyone looking at us like we are probably aliens. I didn't know this before I came but Ethiopia is an incredibly devout Christian nation. It was one of the first regions to adopt Christianity in the 4th c. AD, and the people are adherent to the religion. When we were up on the mountain a lot of the villagers were wearing these white "blanket" type things over themselves. Anyway, when we got back to the hotel, we hung out with all the travelers and talked the night away.

On Tuesday, Ryan and I were a bit more refreshed and ready to go. In the morning we walked to St. George Cathedral, where we were given a personal tour of the inside (2$). The cathedral is actually closed to civilians, so it was a privilege they give to anyone willing to pay. The cathedral was in the center of this "sanctuary" per say, which was filled with trees and wildlife. Most of the people would walk up to the cathedral, say some prayers as the touched or put their heads against the walls and then would go sit/stand in the grass and pray. The cathedral itself was filled with some pretty amazing artwork which actually combined religious art, with that of Ethiopian history, an interesting mix you don't usually see in Churches. For instance, there was a painting of Emperor Haile Selaisse being crowned, followed by some huge mural of St.George slaying a dragon. From lunch we got a delicious lunch at an outdoor cafe (they are very popular and can be found all over in Addis), where we had nice mixed salads and watched the locals go on with their daily lives, especially the beautiful Ethiopian women (seriously, the ladies were gorgeous, but this might also have been b/c I haven't seen a women who wasn't fully covered for 6 weeks). After lunch we walked up to Addis Ababa University and checked out the campus. The school used to be Haile Selaisse's palace, but then after an attempted coup and much student protesting about the government, he donated it to the University. Smart move, good way to buy off the people. The campus was gorgeous, with all sorts of trees, plants, etc. Very green, so different from Yemen. I was really impressed by the aesthetics of the campus. From the University we walked around for another couple of hours before finally heading home.
During our walk we went through some of the "shanty towns" in Addis. There are these huge conglomerations of tin shacks/houses, which are just clumped together in mass. So we walked through them and I took a good amount of pictures which hopefully I'll be able to put up in two weeks, inshallah. As for the evening, Ryan and I just ate at the hotel, fraternized a bit (Jez and Anna left for Djibouti, bummer), so we went to bed nice and early. I also bought a sweet t-shirt which says, Ethiopia on the top with a huge picture of Haile Selassie, and then underneath the picture, "Emperor".

Alright, on to Wednesday. Ryan, Sara and I decided we wanted to head out of town, so we took a public bus to a village about an hour out of town called Debre Zeyit. When we got there we ate at a place called Dreamland, which was this really nice restaurant located in the middle of nowhere off of a dirt road. The place was amazing though, with a deck overlooking the countryside with this huge lake smack in front of us, surrounded by mountains. We watched the villagers take their oxen to the lake for water, and little kids diving off the rocks and swimming in the lake. After a scenic and delicious lunch, we headed off for Lake Babagaya. It took us four mini buses to get to our destination b/c they all wanted to charge us an exorbitant sum to take us right to the lake. We didn't want to be driven straight there though, because for much cheaper you can take horse and carriage to the lake. So finally, on our fourth mini bus trip, we got to the place with the horses and took a horse and carriage (w/ a driver), through the countryside to what we thought was the lake. He dropped us off at this resort and we were quite surprised. Unfortunately, it turned out he had taken us to the wrong Lake (Yriftu), and you had to be guests to swim in it. Luckily he was waiting for us and took us over to the correct lake. Once there, we walked down this little dirt path and then actually had to pay this man 3 birr to use the lake. Good ole capitalism, it has even spread to the villages of Ethiopia. The place must have been a popular spot for locals and travelers though b/c there was even two little boats you could take out. Anyway, we went swimming in this huge, beautiful lake surrounded by the mountains for a while and then air dried on the shore. When we were done, our trusting horse and carriage driver was waiting for us to take us back. He took us to the village where we grabbed a minibus to the main road. From there we grabbed another minibus to the Addis which turned out to be a pretty miserable trip because they packed us in like sardines. Literally the "bus" was probably made for 10 people and we had at least 16 in it. So you couldn't move at all, I couldn't get the window open and we got stuck in traffic so it took us twice as long to get back. I was feeling quite claustrophobic the last bit of the trip when we were hit the traffic jam.

Anyway, we arrived home in the evening, went out to dinner with an assortment of different travelers, some old, some new. After dinner we went to The Cave, a dive bar near our hotel. Inside it was almost pitch black with these tiny rooms and crazy ceiling which was supposed to look like the wall of a actual cave. While it was quite seedy, they had random people from the bar singing, and I couldn't believe how good they were. They really had great voices and they had memorized all the words to the songs they were singing. So for about a half an hour we danced with this absolute crazy old guy, who at one point gave me a huge bear hug. Great stuff. Then from the Cave everyone decided to call it a night, so we actually got to bed pretty early once again (11:30pm)

I think I have carpal tunnel, so I'll leave it at that for now.

Shout out to Jna for the big 5k debut victory! And also to Brink and Dris who also had quite impressive season debuts over at SCSU. It looks like this is going to be a big season for the 5th years, I can't wait to watch you guys run at NEC's.

**Oh, I just heard from Ryan that Anna and Jez got a dhow from Djibouti to Aden and should be in Sana'a in a couple of days. SWEET!

Take Care,

Rich