February 1-3
OK – so this looks like three days in Addis Ababa, but really it is just 36 hours as we got in late on the 1st and left early on the 3rd. So we had one main day to see as much as we could. This post has three parts:
1. The Airport
This was not our best airport visit. We knew two things when arriving: we had to get a visa and we needed cash to get that visa. Online I had read that the visas were $110 per US citizen. This was mostly true. We went looking for an ATM and got turned around pretty quickly instead of following the rest of the people who got off our plane and were heading to customs. The money exchanger who took visa wouldn’t take our cards, so after a few loops around the terminal we finally found customs and an ATM where we pulled out about $250 worth of birr, which is a ton of birr, and went towards the visa counter. We filled out the paperwork at one counter and the power went out in the entire airport. Uh oh. Not the end of the world – it came back on and we moved on with the process. Off to pay for the visas. We found out that they were only 50 bucks a piece (yay!!!) but when we went to pay we were told we couldn’t use birr – only USD. Uh… but they’d take credit card! But none of our cards were accepted. I’m sure it was just chase and capital one shutting us down on random Ethiopian charge. So Michael tried to go back to the cash exchange and exchange the birr for the USD – but they wouldn’t do it. It was a big fiasco and ultimately they took 96USD from me (that was all I had) and the rest in birr.
We walked away a bit flustered, but had our visas and had our passports processed quickly. We were heading to grab our bags when we were pulled aside for additional screening. This is where things get interesting. There were already two women in the room and 3 or 4 officials. The one woman was from Venezuela and didn’t speak English. They had searched her bags and found a package that the officials claimed had drugs in it… but they never opened the package, so I don’t know how they know what was inside. The woman just sat there. The other woman had an expired passport and claimed to be a missionary and wanted us to pray for her. I don’t know how my praying is going to make her passport unexpired, but…
So we got mixed in with these two women and the men who were doing the additional screening were not the most put together people. They were a bit paranoid and kept getting the four of us mixed up. They kept accusing the Christian and Michael of being with the Venezuelan woman. At one point they were putting Michael’s boarding pass in the Venezuelan woman’s face and asking her questions. We didn’t want to get involved and tell them they were getting things confused, but I also didn’t want to get mixed up with her problems which were much larger than ours. They searched all four of our bags and at one point were mixing up the belongings of the two women. I was actually nervous about them going through my backpack because I have an entire bag of prescription meds in there. It’s an excessive amount, but it includes malaria pills which take up a lot of space and a much of random “in case you need it” stuff. But for whatever reason, when he went through my bag, he didn’t look twice at it. It took about 25 minutes for them to realize that Michael and I were married. Once they got that, things got easier for us. I felt bad leaving when we were excused because I was doing the tiny bit of translating for the Venezuela woman, but we also didn’t want to get too involved. For the record, when I told her that they thought she had drugs she adamantly denied it.
Now I was not that worried – probably because Michael and I were together, but I will say that if I was flying solo I would have been nervous in that room. But things worked out ok for us and as we were leaving, the one man said to us “you see – just a joke”. I don’t think that was exactly what he wanted to say, but didn’t make us feel better. We headed to our hotel, grabbed dinner and passed out.
2. The City
I woke up at 8:30 and Mike was gone the next morning. I knew he wanted to go for a run and I knew that it might not be the best place for me to be running solo, so I woke up leisurely and went downstairs to grab breakfast. Cup 1 of Ethiopian coffee and a few traditional dishes for breakfast. By 10am I started getting nervous that Michael hadn’t returned. I wasn’t really sure what time he had left. He rolled in about 10:10 and proved my suspicion – he had gotten lost. Really lost. He had to ask some cab drivers for help and they hadn’t heard of our hotel and eventually he had a super nice man take a bus with him and escort him back to the hotel. I finished my second and third cup of coffee.
After he got showered, we headed into the city. A friend of Betsy’s is from Addis Ababa, and he suggested either getting a taxi to take us around or hiring a car from a tour company for the day. We felt good about taxis, so we went that route. We bargained with blue taxis for the entire time we were in the city. Not totally something in my wheel house, especially since we have no frame of reference – no idea how much things normally cost, etc. But we were mostly successful at it. We had the first cab take us to a coffee shop that Michael wanted to visit. It was in one of the city centers. We found it easily and walked inside and were told that they weren’t taking tourists today. Ok… luckily the place right next door was! So we grabbed coffee there:
As soon as the woman put the coffees down, I kicked the table and made a huge mess. Ugh. This is probably why the other place wasn’t accepting tourists. A note on coffee: I love Ethiopian coffee. Most people who have had it love it. But it is really strong. Super strong. And I was on cup 4 of the day and I have mostly weaned myself off my coffee addiction over the past 3 months. So needless to say, I was super jittery going into this cup. But when in Ethiopia, you have to take advantage!!
After our coffees, we wandered around the center and visited a few stores. I bought a really cute long skirt that you’ll see in 1/9 of every picture of me going forward.
Then we went to see the Monument to the Lion of Judah which is the symbol of Ethiopian Emperors. The statue is particularly well known because in the 1930s it was taken to Rome where a protest broke out by Eritrean patriot Zerai Derek’s who wounded several people with a sabre. He was protesting Italian colonialism and is now considered a patriot and national hero.
So we asked the guy to drop us off there. And he did, but my google maps said it was another 5 or so blocks away, but he promised this was it. We also asked another random person who confirmed this was it.
Note: when I google it, we may have gone to the wrong statue. There is a Lion of Judah statue and a Monument to the Lion of Judah. If our resident Ethiopian can weigh in, that would be awesome!
After the lion we headed to the market! We had a self appointed guide, Wynn, who walked us through showing us all the different areas of this massive market – spices, cloth, food, it was huge! This was also a great opportunity to talk to a local about a few things. He asked almost immediately what we thought of Trump, but otherwise didn’t talk too much politics. He told us a bit about the country and the people. He said that he thought about 50% were Orthodox Christian and about 40% were Muslim. I asked him if there were every issues between the religions and he said an immediate “no”. I followed up on that (how can there be no problems with so many issues in the world between religions). He told me something I thought was very insightful. He told me that he thinks problems between religions are actually government issues and politics, not really issues with the faiths. Wynn helped us find a guy who sold us a table cloth and a scarf who also was very excited to talk with us. We definitely don’t have room for that table cloth in our bags, but the experience was great (another cup of coffee – 5 on the day if you’re keeping count).
Wynn wanted to take us to see more, but we wanted to get back to the hotel to drop stuff off and head to dinner, so we said our goodbyes and negotiated another cab.
After the market, we went to lunch! Another slight misstep that ended up awesome. Michael had a restaurant that he wanted to go to, so we negotiated another blue cab. But when we got there, it was closed. So we went to the restaurant across the street. Such a great decision. There was some language barrier issues. Zoom in on this menu for me, please:
So… not only do we not speak that language, but those are not letters that I can translate in Google. Thankfully, the guy helping us communicate with the waitress ultimately just ordered for us and we had a great meal and a few great Ethiopian beers. I don’t know what type of meat we had, but it was delicious and we were super grateful to another really kind person who wanted to help us out.
Cards and beers!
3. Dinner
Betsy’s friend suggested two restaurants for dinner that were cultural dinners – meaning that they include traditional music and dancing. We’re in! We went to Habesha 2000 and had a great time. The place focused on a stage that had insane dancers and musicians going nonstop. Also, the food… not sure if I’m said enough about how much Michael and I love Ethiopian food. It’s incredible – all of it – so of course we just ate to extreme for the entire day. We can cut back when we get to our next country.
Here’s our dinner:
It was the sampler and it was incredible! So Ethiopian food is… well I’m not qualified to speak on this, but I will anyway. Most Ethiopian meats we’ve had are stews, some are really spicy. Then we typically have a few side dishes – like the spinach shown here and some beans and grains and maybe some cucumber – and then you tear off a piece of the injera (which is the brown stuff underneath all the food above – it is a crepe like consistency and has a sourdough taste to it). So you tear off a piece of injera and then use that as a utensil to grab the other food. No forks or knives – just delicious injera to get all that amazing food into your mouth. There are Ethiopian restaurants in Chicago. I’m not sure about Ann Arbor and STL, but google it. If you have an Ethiopian restaurant nearby, go there!! The food is incredible and just ask them to help you order because it can be a little intimidating. But the food is amazing. So do it.
And here are some videos from the show:
https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_0758.trim_.mov https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/img_0781.trim_.movThey were incredible. At one point I was strong armed into dancing with one of these women. It was really awful (on my part). There is video and there is zero chance I’m posting it here. That said, Michael has been pretty loose in sending it out, so maybe you’ve seen it already somewhere else.
So that was it – we flew out the next morning and are off to Tanzania now for a safari. We are incredibly grateful to all of the kind people in Addis Ababa who helped us navigate their city without knowing the language. We are also reminded how lucky we are to speak English as many people in the city knew at least some and could communicate with us. Thanks also for the great food and coffee (although I’ll have to take a few days off caffeine). We will definitely have to come back to Ethiopia to spend some more time in the city and perhaps visit a few things outside in the country.