Ahhhh...Africa

In the break between summer terms, a group of six students (including myself) set off for the unknowns of Africa! We booked our relatively cheap flights for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, took our final exam for the first term, and headed to the airport. I wish I could say that this was a vacation to paradise. That I saw lions and tigers and tribal dances (oh my!). And, to be honest, that was almost the story I wrote down. But, while it was possibly the worst vacation I have ever been on, oh, what a story.

It began with a suppressed feeling that we were about to be abducted by aliens. The Amharic script, the national language of Ethiopia, was what I would have expected to see on the inside of an alien spaceship as it spirited me away to the Horsehead Nebulea to translate 'Battlestar Galactica' episodes to the alien general army commander. It told me where my floatation device was (under my seat) and, while I could use my laptop on the plane, I was not allowed to my printer or separate speaker system while the plane was in flight. And to think I left my printer at home. We flew over the Red Sea and landed in Djibouti! Despite the best efforts of my classmates, we were not allowed to get off the plane to get "Get Djibouti on the Dance Floor!" or "I've Been to Djibouti" teeshirts. We're so mature. We landed in Addis to cold weather. Cold. WHAT!! The summer season for us is the rainy season in Addis, and therefore it is colder than it is the rest of the year. Each afternoon is an afternoon spent gambling on whether or not you can make it inside somewhere when the freezing cold monsoon (with hail?) hits. It pours for about an hour, forcing everyone inside or into the buses or shoved under awnings outside of stores. A friend of one of our fellow students in Yemen met us at the airport and took us to our hotel. The Beta Abrham is a new hotel very close to the airport and located on the famous Bole Road - the heart of Ethiopian nightlife. We went to a traditional music and dance restaurant. The Ethiopian traditional dance, while very interesting and exciting, reminds me more of someone having an epileptic fit rather than a dancer. The traditional dance involves jerking your shoulders around very very rapidly while throwing the head back and forth. I don't think my body could physically do that, so maybe its mostly jealousy.
Our first full day in Ethiopia, we moved to a much cheaper hotel near the Piazza in the center of town. It was here that I discovered I no longer had my camera with me. Not my camera, my dad's camera. Shoot. So while everyone else went to explore, I spent the day calling the airports, the hotel, emailing the airport and the hotel, searching through my things. All in vain. I have since come to the conclusion that when I took pictures of the Djiboutian airport, it didn't make it back into my bag. My own fault. After calling and emailing, I went for a walk and encountered my first scammer (apparently, everyone on the trip had an experience similar to this). A young man named Soloman approached me on the street and started talking to me about the US and Ethiopia. After buttering me up for about 20 minutes, he mentioned how he was taking a big social sciences test the next week, but he didn't have the money for the book to study. If I would only lend him the money, then he could pass the test! To bad his story was repeated almost word for word in 'The Lonely Planet' under the heading of "The Notebook Scam." Unfortunately, he wasted 30 minutes on me that he could have used scamming someone else. That night, Big Katie, another girl named Anya, and I decided to journey off the next day to Bahir Dar and Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile. The town was about 7 hours by car, so we arranged to leave at 4 am the next morning.

The next morning came quickly, and by 430 am I was wedged in the very back of a Land Cruiser, lying on baggage, as all the other seats in the car were taken. Three Ethiopians sat in the middle, two British travelers sat in the front with the driver, and Anya and Big Katie sat on the seats facing each other in the back. 45 minutes out of Addis, the driver hydroplaned on a wet road, side swiped another car, and went straight off a curve and we rolled down an embankment. Everyone is ok. Everything that could have gone right in a crash like that went right. The car was solid, the ground was soft, there were no trees. Everyone is ok. However, people were pretty banged up except for me - being wedged between the bags and the door, I actually barely moved at all. We got all the people and bags out of the car, I used my limited first aid supply to bandage up any cuts and bumps, Big Katie took a truck to the next village to get a bus, and off we went, back to Addis and to St. Gabriel's Hospital. The Ethiopians chose just to go home, but the Brits - Bod and Ross, a couple taking a year off from working with BBC to travel Africa and now in their 10th month on the continent - had the roughest time, having been in the front seat. Whiplash and a cut wrist and bruised jaw between them. Anya had a cut on her knee and a badly bruised arm that she thought could be broken and Big Katie had twisted around the muscles in her back. We all were checked over by a wonderful doctor named Dr. Yosef, got our (incredibly inexpensive) x-rays for those who needed it, and headed out. We went back to our cheap hotel, got our money back for the trip (which was a lot harder than it should have been. The fact that we had paid to go to Bahir Dar, clearly weren't there, and wanted our money back didn't have the quick results we wanted). After that we decided we were done with dirt cheap places, ran back to the Beta Abrham, and slept for the day. Waking up at dinner time, we decided to celebrate our survival by treating ourselves to come great Italian food. We were very very lucky!

The next day, God, feeling sorry for me that I really hadn't experienced Ethiopian hospitals as I had walked out of the crash with nothing but a scratch, decided to let me have a second chance. I awoke at 4 am with severe food poisoning from the spaghetti the night before, and by 8 was demanding that I be taken to a hospital. As I was rolled into the examining room, throwing up, I heard a laugh, felt a kiss on the top of my head, and looked up to see the same smiling Dr. Yosef asking, "Weren't you the healthy one yesterday?" One blood test later, and I had an IV in my arm replenishing my fluids and giving me a double dose of Ciproflaxin to kill all the bacteria in me. 3 hours later, I was feeling better and headed back to the hotel to sleep through the rest of the day, awaking only to eat crackers and watch BBC World news.

Our last full day in Ethiopia, I decided that, regardless of my health, I had to get out and see at least a little bit of the city. We had a wonderful breakfast of pastries and headed over to the Zoological Museum. Addis has more traffic circles than stoplights, and in the middle of each one is a splendid monument to some massacre or king or event in history. The Zoological Museum was a true pleasure. It was only 5 rooms, but each one was packed with the mammals, bird-life, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and marine life that Ethiopia possessed. There were giant snake skins on the wall, frogs crammed into jars, bats (that according to Big Katie, looked as if someone had caught them by slamming them between the pages of an Encyclopedia), every bird ever found in Ethiopia, all the great mammals of the plains as well as the small mammals of the forests - all stuffed to perfection. We met a 'bloated leopard whose stuffer did not know when to stop stuffing' (according to 'The Lonely Planet'), a crested bustard (a funny looking bird from the bustard family), a zorrilla (a kind of skunk), locusts, tortoises, giant fish, antelope, warthogs, elephant femurs next to human femurs, anything alive at Ethiopia at one point or another. We also were lucky enough to be the only people in the museum at the time, and got a personal tour from the museum's director explaining the zoological background of each animal to us. Wonderful!
Next on the list was the Ethnological Museum, located in the middle of Addis Ababa University. The walk through the university itself was wonderful - so incredibly green! The museum itself was also the headquarters of the Institute for Ethiopian studies at the university, and was located in Haile Selassie's former palace. Haile Selassie was appointed Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930 and reigned until 1974. His rise to emperor sparked the beginning of the Rastafarian religion, who honors him as the religious symbol of God incarnate. Anyway, this museum took us through three sections : Birth and childhood (birth customs, childhood games, traditional stories, childhood clothing), Adulthood (marriage customs in different tribes, war, religion, farming, weaving, house construction), and Death (burial customs, burial structures, etc). The also had the bedrooms of the Emperor and Empress preserved, including the bullet hole in the mirror from the coup and the all important bathrooms. A young boy from Michigan wrote in the guestbook, "I really feel good about the Emperor's bathroom."
After this Big Katie and I headed back to the hotel for naps, as neither of was were 100% healthy. We met Anya and a new friend from Portugal, Pedro, for another traditional dinner with traditional music and dance. Pedro is doing graduate research in Addis, and explained that the government is rationing electricity, so his section of the city doesn't have power every Monday. But the dinner was great and the music was wonderful. It was a great last dinner in Addis.

Our last morning, we decided to head into the Merkato, the largest open air market in Eastern Africa. It was HUUUUGE. It went on forever and seemed to have everything one could ever want. Except, however, the Beyonce tee-shirts from when Beyonce performed in Addis. Big Katie and I saw them on the streets and decided that no trip to Ethiopia would be complete without them. We failed. By the way, Ethiopia is on the Coptic calender. This not only allows them to say, for serious, that they have 13 months of sunshine, but it also means that they are about 7 years behind the rest of the world and so just had their Millenium celebrations last year.
After wandering through the Merkato for about 40 minutes, we caught a ride back to the airport and flew home!

Looking back on the trip, it was an experience of incredible variety. We got an upclose and personal tour of the hospital systems, but ate well, saw most of Addis, and arrived back in Yemen safe and sound. Unfortunately, there wont be any pictures, but I'll try and snag some from Big Katie when she gets them on her computer.
Much love,
Katie