13 Months of Sunshine

According to my Ethiopian visa, I arrived in Addis Ababa at 11:45am on Friday 1/29/2001. Which is a little odd since, as most astute readers will recognize, it is October 2008. Turns out Ethiopia is on the Julian calendar which in addition to being 7½ years behind the rest of us, consists of 12 months of thirty days plus a 13th of five or six days. And their time starts at sunrise, so when they say 11:45am, they really mean 5:45pm. It had all the makings of a great, lost in translation weekend.

We ventured to the Sheraton Addis which was incredibly ridiculous and looked like it belonged in the French countryside instead of Africa's fourth largest city. But at $600 a night, we peaced out and checked into our government run hotel that looked exactly like it belonged in Africa's fourth largest city, but as an insane asylum. Got up early the next morning and went to the Mercado, supposedly the world's largest outdoor market. It started out sane enough with gridded streets lined by little shops offering yarn, construction equipment, furniture, ya know, the usual. After a few turns we were quickly immersed in narrow, twisting alleys full of people selling chickens out of shopping bags, huge chunks of salt and a blacksmith who was probably the most amused person in Ethiopia when I tried to hammer some burning metal. So we wandered around, had some fifteen cent coffee and the first of many sprees: a really tasty mix of layered fresh fruit juices (papaya, passion, guava, avocado, orange, etc).

We then hightailed it to the airport for our flight to Lalibela, an ex-capital of Ethiopia with these incredible five hundred year old churches. But not just old churches, old churches that were carved from a single piece rock. But not just from a single piece of rock, they were carved from the top down into the mountain, then the insides were excavated. Pretty amazing. The city itself is also really nice, bisected by a big cobblestone road and set amongst a bunch of gorges, hills and green farmland. We checked into our "tukol", a really nice round house with a balcony overlooking the churches, then ventured around the town with a steadily growing gaggle of children trailing us wherever we went.

The next day we woke up early and started our tour of the churches. They are really incredible to see, supposedly took 25 years and 40,000 people to construct 11 of them. They are pretty well preserved (I guess that happens when you just use one big rock) and have some sweet old paintings, wooden doors in rock walls, altars, carvings and manuscripts in cool languages. Probably the coolest part was the people that were in the churches, all wearing white robes and head coverings that looked really Muslim even though they were all Christian (there were also Jewish stars of and Hindu swastikas on the temples) and praying in an ancient biblical language. The priests were also pretty decked out and most would happily dawn sunglasses so the tourists (not me of course) could take flash pictures of them inside. We hit up all the rock churches, took a bazillion photos, learned how to write Saint Gore in Ahmric () and then headed back to Addis.

We decided that the asylum/hotel that is Ras hotel wasn't quite going to cut it for us, so we stumbled into the lovely Addis View Hotel which was really really nice and gave us a really really great rate (twin room for $40 including breakfast). Went out for some Ethiopian food which consists of a tangy pancake covered with lots of different veggies and meats and Tedj, a traditional Ethiopian honey wine (as we would continuously discover, Ethiopian wines, both grape and honey, have a way to go). Barhopped a bit, checking out some traditional dancing, a cool rooftop bar and a really strange bar under a mockup of an airplane (one really nice thing about Addis was being able to walk around at night and not be very concerned about safety).

The next day we toured the city, catching a really cool Ethiopian wedding (lots of singing and dancing and drum banging) and visiting Lucy, our 3.2 million year old great-great-great-great-great-great-you get the picture-grandmother. While Lucy wasn't terribly impressive (she's only 3.2 feet tall), the rest of the people in Addis really were. Tons of people came up to us offering help when we were looking at maps, they stopped us on the street to say hello and shake our hand and were really happy to show us the way to a restaurant or tea house. I admit that I was initially suspicious of most of the people, but in the end I think Ethiopians are some of the most genuinely friendly people I've met. Unfortunately, on the flip side of that, the poverty in Ethiopia is much more striking than most places I've seen. People begging on their hands and knees or just lying in the middle of sidewalks (but hey, at least there are sidewalks!), a guy very resignedly picking food out of a trash pile or the woman who (best as we can tell) offered us her child because she couldn't take care of it. And honestly, thats probably a very small slice of the true rural poverty and famine that affects Ethiopia. So, like most of Africa, Ethiopia is a country of contrasts.

Anyways, we had a mediocre dinner of Arabic food (overall I was not that impressed by the food there), smoked a little sheesha, had a hilarious exchange of the waiter trying to figure out whether he should hand us the bill or put it on the table and called it a trip.

And just in time for me to finish this post, I'm off to Rwanda to go gorilla trekking.

Tuta Onana