Obsessions of East (and a bit of North) Africa

In case you're new, whenever we finish traveling through a certain region of the world, we try to pick one thing that each country seemed to be "obsessed" with. This is totally subjective, of course, and not meant to offend. Well, not too much. If you've been to any of these places, feel free to let us know if you agree or disagree with our choices.

On to the countries we visited in Eastern Africa!

Tanzania: Spare tire covers. I never would have noticed this, but Andy pointed out that nearly every truck in Tanzania had a fancy spare tire cover on the back with some sort of design or corporate logo or something. It did seem to be true. Chalk that one up to boys looking at cars more closely than girls do...

Rwanda: Giving every town two names. And the names are never even close to sounding the same! Musanze = Ruhengheri. Butare = Huye. I'm sure there were more. This made finding a bus to the destination you wanted interesting.

Uganda: Bananas. Growing on the mountain slopes. Loading down bikes being cycled to market. Mashed up in the staple starch, matoke. They're everywhere!

Kenya: Butcher shops. AKA "butcheries." You know, you can see half a skinned goat carcass hanging in the window in many, many places across Africa...but somehow, not quite with the same ubiquity that we saw them in Kenya. No wonder nyama choma is so popular--there's a lotta goat out there to barbecue!

Ethiopia: Walking sticks. As soon as you get out into the countryside, you kinda can't help but notice how pretty much every male over the age of 8 carries a walking stick. Approximately half the aisle space on any bus is taken up with a tangle of sticks, which is kind of a catch-22, because it makes having a stick necessary to negotiate your way out without falling...but to have a stick available for this purpose, you'll have needed to bring it on the bus, and stash it in the aisle...

Egypt: Shisha. You may know this as hookah (the Moroccan term). You probably don't know it by its Jordanian name, and my favorite--hubbly bubbly (I'm not kidding!). But anyway, it's a big apparatus for smoking tobacco, usually fruit-flavored to make it taste sweet, and it's incredibly popular with Egyptians and tourists alike. We don't smoke and didn't try it...it smelled OK when I caught a whiff, but apparently smoking one shisha does as much damage to your lungs as an entire pack of cigarettes, so, um, not so good for you.

Financial Update: Eastern Africa

It's time once again for what may be our most boring blog entry for regular readers, our Financial Update. Boring, but very useful to anyone who is thinking about traveling for a long time. As a reminder, prices are the total for both of us for everything that we need while there. It does not include general trip expenses such as insurance. So, here we go.

Tanzania- $163 per day over 18.5 days. Visas were $100 each at the border (these are much cheaper if you are not American). This is an expensive one. Without my $1100 climb of Kilimanjaro or our $400 safari, the average is only $97 per day. Then again, why go to Tanzania if you aren't going to do anything interesting? Hotels and food are not very expensive if you go to the places that locals go (and locals often stay in rather nice hotels in Tanzania, it seems), but anything even remotely connected to tourism will cost a fortune. National Parks often charge $50 for entrance.

Rwanda- $223 per day over 6 days. No visa required for Americans, but many nationalities need a visa before entry. Entirely because we paid $500 each to see the gorillas. Of course, that is essentially all there is to do in the country other than look at the beautiful countryside or read more about the depressing genocide. Without gorillas, it was only $46 per day. Hotels are a bit more expensive in Rwanda and transport is more expensive than surrounding countries, but not bad.

Uganda- $149 per day over 6 days. Visas were $50 each at the border. Another expensive one. We took an expensive three day organized tour to Murchison Falls that accounts for most of the expense. Outside of Kampala, life is cheap. If you had more time and did everything yourself, it would be much cheaper.

Kenya- $71 per day over 5 days. Visas were $25 each at the border. This is actually made cheaper because we only visited one national park and we stayed with a family in Nairobi. We did the safari part in Tanzania. If you wanted to do a safari in Kenya, the price for Tanzania above is probably more realistic.

Ethiopia- $89 per day over 16.5 days. Visas were $20 each at the airport. Ethiopia is both dirt poor and dirt cheap. We include the entire cost of our flights ($300 each) in this average because Ethiopia refuses to issue overland visas, forcing us to fly. Without that, the average would be closer to $50 per day. Food is especially cheap (and good).

Egypt- $77 per day over 13.5 days. Visas were $15 each at the airport. Everything in Egypt is cheap except entry to all the ruins. Probably a third of our budget was spent on entry fees. Hotels, food, and transport are all cheap and have a high standard.

That's it. Hope you found it helpful. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

Ethiopian Eats

Ethiopia and food. Where to begin? Ethiopia and India are the two countries that we have wanted to visit just for the food for years. While we had a wonderful time in Ethiopia, we will probably both lay on our death beds one day and say, "Do you remember the food in Ethiopia? It was to die for." Then we'll die. That's how good the food was.

Number of other foreigners we met who feel the same way about Ethiopian food? None. Most of them hated it. Mostly because nearly all food in Ethiopia is eaten with a special bread called injera. It is made of a local grain called teff, to which they add yeast and water, let it sit for three days, then cook it into giant pancakes. I would describe it as tangy. Enough intro. Now to food pictures.

Like everything else in Ethiopia, yogurt is a bit different. Or so Tara tells me. Like injera bread, it is a bit more sour. But, most surprising, they add chili powder instead of sugar. The waiter looked at Tara like she was crazy when she started adding sugar, then brought over the chili powder spice mix and showed her how to add it. Oh, and they all look like this one, making me think that they just cover the milk lid with foil and put it out in the sun for a day or two until it ferments.
Sometimes in American Ethiopian restaurants, they will serve carrot cake or baklava. We never saw carrot cake in the entire country, so we have no idea why that is common in the US. We found baklava in only one place in Addis Ababa, but it was the best baklava that I have ever eaten. Very much worth all 60 cents that we paid, which is very expensive by Ethiopian standards.
Back on the street, I found a lady selling small bags of unidentifiable crunchy things. I immediate bought a bag despite the high cost of 6 cents, which was probably just because we were tourists. They tasted like unidentifiable crunchy things, sort of like the fried things you put in Chinese soup.
For lunch on our first day, we went to the brilliantly named Addis Ababa restaurant in Addis Ababa. None of the waiters spoke English, and the only menu translation they had was incomprehensible, but we understood the word combination in two of the dishes, so we got those. We had no way of knowing that we had ordered two combinations of five meat dishes each, resulting in this plate of ten amazing meat dishes. You can see the typical serving system of putting puddles of food on top of injera, so at the end you get to eat your plate which has been soaking up juice for the whole meat. Yum!
I'm sad to report that despite our best efforts, we were unable to finish the entire meal. It would have easily fed six normal people, which is three normal Andys, but even eating to capacity, enough remained to feed at least a small dog. We liked the restaurant so much that we took a picture of it.
Ethiopia has cafes everywhere. Though they claim that they were never occupied, I suspect that the cafes are a result of the years when Italy "controlled" the country. Many cafes had something on the menu called peanut tea, so I ordered it. This was when we first learned that "tea" in Ethiopia just means that it is hot and isn't coffee. Peanut tea is just peanut butter and hot water blended together, which you then sugar to taste. In my case, a lot of sugar. But it is then like drinking liquid peanut butter and a really amazing drink.
Fruit juice is also very popular in Ethiopia, but also unlike any other fruit juice. They take the fruit and blend it with such density that you have to eat it with a spoon. Like a smoothie, but thicker. These are papaya and pineapple. The pineapple comes out a bit thinner because the fruit is so juicy, but you can see what I mean with the papaya one. You can then add sugar and lime if you like.
And another option is to mix juice flavors. Here is Tara with an avocado and pineapple juice. Avocado is a very popular flavor there and is just about like drinking guacamole through a straw. Or with a spoon. With sugar added.
A very popular dish for breakfast is firfir. Firfir is just injera bread in sauce, served on injera bread. A lot of injera. I timed it. It took 14 minutes and 22 seconds for this dish to go through my digestive system.

The beer of Tara's choice in Ethiopia is St. George's. She was told that this is a woman's beer in one city, but in the next city, all the men were drinking it. She was relieved to be back in a country where the beer is normal sized and not in giant bottles that make her drunk. However, she also tried tej, the local honey wine. Apparently, it is stronger than in America because she could barely walk after a tiny glass.

A popular dish from southern Ethiopia is Kitfo. This is seasoned ground beef, normally served raw. However, we were with a local who told us that you would have to be stupid to eat raw beef in Ethiopia due to parasites, even at the fancy restaurant where we were eating. So, we had ours slightly cooked. They give everyone a long handled spoon made of a cow horn to eat it, which is fun.

This is a shot of rolled injera with a serving of shiro. Shiro encompasses a large range of dishes made from mushed beans and various seasonings, then cooked in a little hot pot. Almost always tasty.

One morning, we were trying to order breakfast. One waiter spoke a bit of English, so he described a dish to us as bread with tomato and milk. Not sure why we thought that sounded good, but it turned out to be a sour cream like substance (which is called yogurt as well, as we later discovered), and was gross. It looked nice, though.

To make up for that dish, we also ordered fitera with honey and got this cracker-like pizza shape with honey. Not bad. And much better than the above.

In the Simien Mountains, we met some very kind American researchers. They shared their mac and cheese with Tara, which, despite not being terrific Ethiopian food, made Tara's week. Thanks, researchers!

Also thanks to the researchers, we discovered the full breakfast. We at first thought this meant a big breakfast that would make us full, but it turns out that full (also spelled fule, but rarely fool) is a mix of tomato, bean, onions, and spices that is served with bread to dip into it. Really good and we had it for many breakfasts.

Ethiopia is apparently lightyears ahead in cookie technology. Most of the cookies there come with two, side-by-side cream flavors. Part of the excitement is that you don't know what flavors until you open the package. This one was orange and vanilla, like creamsicle. Tasty.

Wednesdays and Fridays are fasting days for Ethiopian Orthodox. That means basically vegan (I say basically because we never completely figured out the rules). All restaurants serve fasting dishes on those days and many serve only fasting dishes. Some places are better than others and fasting days seem to let chefs show their creativity. The firfir on this plate was a weird vanilla-doused injera. Not great, but high creativity points.

Macchiato is very popular. I tried to make Tara explain the difference to me between a cappuccino and a macchiato, as I see the main difference that a cappuccino is bigger (at least in Ethiopia). She never gave me a satisfactory answer, but she did drink a few macchiatos even though she doesn't really love coffee. Ethiopia being the birthplace of coffee convinced her to try.
One popular "tea" is to serve hot Tang. Orange, mango, or pineapple. Always with the option to add sugar. "Excuse me, would you like some sugar in that sugar water?
Many bakeries exist, mostly serving nastly Italian pastries. For my mom's 93rd birthday, we ate a piece of cake for her. Maybe she isn't quite 93, but getting close...
One day when our stomachs were still full of injera from the previous meal, we ordered a "fasting" (vegan) pizza. Not bad--we especially like the addition of potato.

We saw on a few menus something called Sprice. We just assumed this was meant to say Sprite, but then learned that sprice is a mix of tea and coffee. Tara got it, took a tiny sip, and promptly dumped a cup of sugar in to make it drinkable. I hate coffee and refused to even try it.
For our fanciest meal in some time, we went to the famous Italian place called Castelli's in Addis Ababa. Tara loved her ravioli. I tolerated my saffron pasta, which turned out to be filled with parsley. I hate parsley. A lot.
Injera is made in villages over a massive clay pan with a fire underneath. We saw one when we were lucky enough to eat in a village at our guide's house, but we thought it would be rude to pull out the camera and start taking photos of his kitchen. However, this is an electric version that was at the orphanage we toured. They were happy to have us take a picture, and had enough experience with foreigners not to find or obsession with the injera machine completely ridiculous. Just pour the batter on like pancake batter, and 2 or 3 minutes later you have injera.
On our last night, we went to a touristy restaurant, complete with singing and dancing, with Nega, one of our new friends who runs an orphanage and youth program, and his wife. Here is Tara outside with the glowing replica of the table on which food is served.
Banana gum is very popular in Ethiopia. Most people chew a quarter piece at a time. I think a local thought I was being very lavish when I ate a whole piece.
Most notable about this mix of dishes is the dark injera, made with red teff. Just a slightly more irony taste. Also notable is the yucky cheese spread over the dish, which forced me to pick around it and not be able to eat the last few bites of injera at the end that still had cheese on them.
Not all the food in Ethiopia is stewed. Only 99%. You can also get little pieces of meat grilled and served over little charcoal embers. Fun, dangerous, and good. What more can you ask for from your dinner? Oh, right, it could also be served by someone who looks like a supermodel, which was apparently a prerequisite to work at this restaurant...
That's it. Food in Ethiopia really was amazing. We loved Ethiopian food in the US, but loved it even more in Ethiopia. What's more, most meals cost $1 or $2 for the same amount of food that would cost $20 in the US. We will go back to visit one day even if it is only to have a couple of meals.

Is Ethiopia Middle Earth?

As Andy hinted in the last post, Ethiopia has some uncanny similarities to J.R.R. Tolkien's magical land of Middle Earth. And it's not just that you can get a bus from a castle-filled place called Gonder to another called Shire! (Yes, we took that bus). There are more clues...

For instance, Google some images of Ethiopia's main language, Amharic. Doesn't it look an awful lot like Elvish?

Also, in addition to the omnipresent, crepe-like injera bread, southern Ethiopia also has a very dense bread called qocho (made of the pounded starch of the "false banana plant"--don't ask me what that is, I don't know). A few bites of this bread could fill your stomach for a day...not unlike Tolkien's magical Elvish bread, lembas!

Finally, take a look at this image, which we found carved into one of the amazing rock-hewn churches (more about them later) in Lalibela, Ethiopia (which, btw, used to be called Roha--that's only one letter away from Rohan!). Anyway, is this not the very image of the EYE OF SAURON??

I could go on all day (Simien Mountains--sounds kind of like Silmarillion!), but I'll spare you. Instead, let's jump back into the story where Andy left off. I believe that our hero and heroine were boarding the bus to Shire, scratching at their innumerable flea bites.

Oh, wait, he didn't mention that part? Yes, well, in the town outside of Simien Mountains National Park, we finally encountered the infamous, bed-plaguing fleas of Ethiopia. We had been warned by other tourists that Ethiopia had a flea problem, but we'd been lucky up until that point. It turns out that a lot of hotel beds have jumping, biting fleas living inside (our advice: avoid the Simien Park Hotel--or at least its older, cheaper section--next time you are in Debark)...but so do carpets at many churches, and you have to take off your shoes to enter a church in Ethiopia. So even if you stay at super-clean places, you may well get some bites while touristing. Ugh. I itched for many, many days after our stay in that hotel.

Anyway, on the very long, very sweaty bus ride north, I was befriended by 7-year-old Aden, who spoke an impressive amount of English for someone so tiny. Lord knows why she wanted to sit in my lap (I smelled terrible), but quickly she was teaching me and Andy the names of barnyard animals we passed in Amharic and drilling us on numbers. Thanks to her, we can now count from 1 to 10 in Amharic! She will make a great teacher someday.
We finally arrived in Shire after dark and, horrified by the thought of more fleas, shelled out $15 for a room at the swankiest hotel in town (usually we paid closer to $5 a night). Well-rested, we arrived the next day in Axum, the historically important city in Ethiopia's far north, near the Eritrea border.

One of Axum's main attractions is its collection of tombs and stellae, which date back to the time of Christ. Here we are inside one of the ancient kings' tombs.
Unlike the storytelling or god-glorifying stellae you find at, say, old Mayan sites in the Americas, the stellae in Axum are more like enormous gravestones. This collapsed one would have been the biggest ever erected there, but it didn't stay upright long and has been lying in pieces for centuries in the main stellae field.

After its collapse, the engineers figured out that they needed a big underground base if they wanted such a large structure to stay upright.
Here's one that fared better. The patterns are just for decoration, and only the most important people in town were allowed to have a carved stella.

Lesser citizens got plainer stellae, like these.

Axum has its own Rosetta-like stone, with a story about a king's military exploits inscribed in Ge'ez (the predecessor of Amharic), Greek, and...uh, somethin' else. It was found a few years ago by farmers plowing up a field in the area.

At the edge of town is this mouth of a tunnel which, legend has it, leads all the way to Eritrea. It hasn't been excavated yet, though. We suggest that archeologists hurry up on that one, since the official border with Eritrea is currently closed (stupid political problems!), so they'd be opening up a great possible new route...

Near the tunnel is another huge king's tomb. I can't remember the king's name, but he became a monk in his later years and was buried at the monastery, so his big fancy tomb is empty, right down to the stone coffins still stored inside.

Axum's other big attraction is the St. Mary of Zion church complex, which has the ruins of the holiest church in Ethiopia...and, according to Ethiopians, at least, also houses the Ark of the Covenant! Also known as the Ten Commandments--purportedly shipped off to Ethiopia for safekeeping during some sacking of Israel or other way back in the day.

They charge you a lot to enter the church complex, then don't let you even get near the building where the ark is supposedly being held. Apparently it is guarded by a single monk for life (when he's about to die, he has a dream that tells him which monk should take over for him) and no one else is allowed to go inside to see it. Not even the kings of old. So, is it really the ark of the covenant? We were skeptical, but I guess we won't rule it out. Anyway, here's the building where it supposedly lives.

Here's the interior of the new St. Mary of Zion church, built the 1950s or 60s (note the psychedellic stained-glass windows) next to the ruins of the old one.

The coolest thing in the church is this brilliantly illustrated, nearly-1,000-year-old Christian book. The people in charge there swear that it's going to be put under glass next year for preservation (as it should be!!), but in the meantime were happy to thumb through and show us the cool pictures.

There is a monastery on site that women aren't allowed into, so Andy went in alone. He got to pose with a mural and a prayer stick, which he says the old men use in some way while they are praying, though he hasn't quite explained how...

This monastery mural (complete with cartoon captioning!) tells the story of a lion who ate a man's donkey, but then felt so bad that he agreed to do all the donkey's work for the man for the rest of his life, so he did farm work and got ridden around for penance.

On our second day in Axum, we visited a farther-away stellae field (which also appeared to now be a wheat field). Here is Andy standing near one for size comparison.

We don't know what kind of bird this is, but it looks cool, no?

Across the road from the stelae were the ruins of the palace of the Queen of Sheba, except that they aren't really because they were built many years after her reign. Still, there was a shady overlook where we were able to relax for a while and enjoy the views.

Our next stop was Lalibela, a city that was either a three-day bus ride or a 45-minute flight away. Guess who broke down and sprung for the flight? If you guessed us, you'd be correct. Travel by road takes such a long time in Ethiopia.

Lalibela is famous for its 13 rock-hewn churches--whole churches literally carved out of enourmous rocks--from around the year 1100. They are really incredible and have to be seen to be believed. Despite the shockingly-high-for-Ethiopia admission fee (over $20 per person), and, you know, the religious factor, this was Andy's favorite thing in Ethiopia (mine is still the food).

Each church has its own name, fun features, and cool story, most of which I'll surely forget. But the basic idea is that this was all the brainchild of King Lalibela (for whom the city is named now), who designed most of the churches and somehow got armies of thousands of people (and, according to legend, angels as well) to chip them out of the rock during his reign.

I believe that this one is St. Mary's, the second church to be built and one of the monolithic ones, which means it was carved out of one giant single hunk of rock. Is that incredible, or what?
The churches are surrounded by more walls of the same rock they were cut from, so you can imagine the people digging them out (with the tools of 1,000 years ago, no less!) and then carving their facades from the in-between space.
By standing up on the walls, you can be level with the church's roof. You can also see in this picture an example of the huge protective roofs Unesco has put over many of the churches to help shield them from the elements.

The insides of many of the churches were no less impressive than the outsides.--and still made of the same hunk of rock! The usual method for doing the inside would be to carve a window into the outside of the church, then start hollowing it out from there. Amazing to stand under a beautifully carved arch like this and think that the space you occupy was once solid stone.

The rock walls surrounding some of the churches had these little hobbit-holes (more Middle Earth!!) in them. OK, they weren't for hobbits, but actually were lived in by monks...and during festivals, when the town is overflowing with pilgrims, apparently people still set up house inside! You should see how small these spaces are in person.
Lalibela's masterpiece, and the final church to be built, is St. George's. In addition to being Ethiopia's finest beer, St. George is also the country's patron saint. Anyway, this incredible church was, obviously, designed in the shape of a cross. It looks cool from the top...
...and just keeps getting better.
In its surrounding wall, St. Georges has a crypt-like hole with the clearly visible remains of three dead monks from some indeterminate long time ago. The story is that these monks had traveled the world seeing all its beautiful churches, but when their eyes finally fell upon St. Georges, they said that they had seen the most beautiful one of all and were now ready to die. Then they curled up in their hobbit-hole to go to sleep, and the Lord took them that very night. So their remains were never moved away from the church.
We saw half the churches one day and the other half the following day...which happened to be a Saint's Day for one of the ones we hadn't seen yet. Lucky us! There was a lot of singing and dancing all morning in that church. We even got a bit of video, which we will try to post one day.
If you can pull yourself away from the churches in Lalibela, you'll notice that the town has a beautiful setting, too. Some friends we made in town took a hike up a mountain to a monastery and said that the views were even better up there.
Our next stop was Bahir Dar, which was only a 9-hour bus ride away. That felt positively short to us! I took this picture at a cafe there to document the Ethiopian phenomenon of spreading fresh grass inside and out of your home, restaurant, etc. This seems to happen most after it rains, maybe to soak up the mud and water from people's shoes and make it easier to sweep outside? Pretty clever, if so. And it smells good.
We took a boat out on Lake Tana to visit a few of its famous island monasteries. If you ever go, note that they all charge the same admission (about $3), but some are definitely more worth seeing than others. Luckily, we'd had some good advice from other travelers and headed straight to the best-decorated monastery, which I think was Ura Kidane Meret.

Its many vibrant paintings told stories, some Biblical, some traditional Ethiopian. We especially liked the ones with the devil and his minions crouching along the bottom somewhere.We also liked the ones where someone was taking a poop.
Better than the monasteries was our trip to Blue Nile Falls, in a village outside of Bahir Dar. They are quite impressive, and at the admission rate of $1 per person, 1/30th the price of Victoria Falls.
Finally, we returned to Addis Ababa for a last hurrah before our flight to Egypt. Here we were extremely lucky to have the chance to meet up with Bisrat and Nega, two close friends of Andy's cousin, Michael. Michael has spent long stretches of time in Ethiopia over the past few years, most recently co-setting-up an amazing NGO that helps street kids and orphans. More about that in a second.

Bisrat, who is a translator and one of the nicest people we have ever met in our lives, took half a day off work to take us around Addis. Together we went up to a hill village north of the city for some views...but actually, the most interesting thing we saw was women carrying unbelievably large loads of wood down 10 kilometers to town to sell. (No men carrying this stuff, just women and sometimes some donkeys.) Then, once it's sold, they turn around and walk the 10k back, uphill. If this isn't a bit of insight into how hard some people's lives are in Africa, I don't know what is.

A donkey with its load, near the bottom of the hill.
Next, Bisrat took us to visit the Onesimus Children Development Association, which is where we met Michael's other friend, Nega, and a whole lot of awesome kids. Bisrat used to work there, and Nega runs the OCDA, which Michael helped set up. For an organization that is only three years old, it is amazingly well-run and functions as both a home for a handful of orphaned or homeless boys and girls and as a drop-in-center for hundreds of street kids and very poor kids "on the verge of street-ism." They can get a meal, play sports, read books, do art projects, talk with the wonderful full-time social worker...the list goes on.

And if you met these kids and saw how smart and vivacious they were, how much they are accomplishing at school and what their plans are for the future, you would just never believe that they were street children. You would not believe that some of them had been taken into the city and abandoned to fend for themselves because their parents couldn't afford to keep them in the village anymore. Or that the parent they were sleeping next to under a plastic sheet out on the pavement died one morning, leaving them orphaned. But somehow, they have survived, and the OCDA is doing crucial work supporting them and working with the community to keep more kids from turning to the streets. Amazingly, there are 60,000-100,000 children living on the streets of Addis Ababa alone...a staggering number.

You can read more about this organization, and make a donation online or find out how to by mail at www.theforsakenchildren.org/projects/childrens-home-ethiopia.org. The organization already has some income-generating projects (like a chicken farm!) in place and has plans to become financially independent within the next few years, but for now I am sure that they would appreciate any donation to keep things running. It does have a slight religious bent, but so do many such organizations in such a religious country as Ethiopia. Anyway, I really hope that you might decide to join me and Andy in supporting their work.

Here are some pics of us with the kids! This is at the drop-in center and girls' halfway house. The tall girl all the way on the right lives there--she 14 and top of her class in English. She is really obsessed with India and wants to go to university there...she spent most of our time talking to us about India and asking where we plan to go when we get there. We had to tell her that she surely knows more about destinations in India than we do!

This one is at the boys' halfway house across town. The woman on the far left is the energetic young social worker who works full-time with all the kids, and the woman next to her is the boys' "house mom," who looks after them, cooks for them, and apparently taught them to make their beds the neatest I've ever seen from a bunch of boys. The boy in the front in the green shirt is Andy's Aunt Susan's (Michael's mom's) sponsored child--Aunt Susan, if you're reading this, now it's your turn to go meet him! These boys were such a hoot, they taught us traditional dance moves and hand-slappy games and we had a wonderful time hanging out with them. After our visit to the halfway houses, we went out for dinner with Nega and his lovely wife at a restaurant that also has traditional music and dance. It was about as touristy as Addis gets, but that means that food cost around $4 a plate instead of $1 a plate and was still delicious. Here are the four of us together.
I love a dance show, and this one was no exception. We got to watch many impressive dances from up and down Ethiopia. My favorite may have been this dance in which the woman wears a hat that looks like the lid that goes on the basket-like eating tables (see picture above) when they're not in use.
Nega kindly drove well out of his way to drop us at our hotel, where we soon met Bisrat again for a farewell Fanta before heading to the airport for our 4AM (gah!) flight. Bisrat is an incredibly popular man and his phone is always ringing, so we didn't think much of it when he got on the horn at the cafe. Soon enough, though, we realized that he had arranged for his friend to come take us all to the airport together! Bisrat is the best. We realized we didn't have a picture with him, so here's one of us all in the airport parking lot at 10PM.
We will miss you, Bisrat! And we'll miss Ethiopia. Sure, there were some insects, some long and painful bus rides, and many incredibly poor people who are suffering while their government wastes time doing things like blocking Blogger for the whole country so the opposition party can't use it to communicate. (Yeah, our new Ethiopian friends can't even access this blog.) But it is also a beautiful, fascinating place filled with unforgettably kind people...and amazing food. We didn't get around to exploring the south of the country this time, there just weren't enough days, but I'm pretty confident that we'll be back. Maybe you will join us?