Long Live The Sar

The weekend was very relaxed with a busy morning @ the mission on Saturday. Saturday afternoon we (Jake, Zev, Berhanu, Ilana, and I) went to the Merkkato. A sprawling complex of stalls, shops, indoor "malls," and with more people than you can shake a stick at, it was a little overwhelming. The size of the area, the number of goods being traded, and the never-ending shouts of "hello" and "faranji" were enough to make one go insane. If I were to try and answer everything shouted at me, my head would surely fall off from the constant snapping side-to-side to answer everyone. In general, it was less like a market and more like too many stores crammed into pillboxes and stacked together. Two hours there was enough to make me want to go and sit in my hotel room for hours, simply so that no beggars, shoe-shine boys, vendors, or random people could bother me. So that was my saturday (topped off w/dinner in the hotel). The first item on the agenda for sunday...

The people here are nice. very nice. one of the best things about the mission is the area surrounding it. As Abebe told me, Piazza and Bole are the only parts of Addis that are like a city, the rest is like a village. My hotel is in Piazza and on my short walk (200 yds) from the hotel to the taxi stop, I pass at least 10 different bars and countless people. But when I get off the taxi and start walking towards the Mission, it feels more like a village. There is Tza'ai, the girl who works at my internet cafe where I go every day for part of my 3 hour lunch. There is Daniel, the guy who works at the "pool hall" (1 table) and he gives me a big hug every time i pass by (~6x/day). He has also made it his mission to teach me amharic, so every day he tries to teach me a new phrase of general conversation. So far, I know the first 2 lines of any basic conversation (hello and how are you? - i'm a slow learner). And then there is the lady at the restaurant who told me ...

I forgot to put this in the last post, but I also got to experience one of Ethiopia's "different" (to be polite) traditions...last night bogut invited me to eat injera with him and Rick's night guard.  So we went outside and the way you eat the injera is, essentially it's a big thin bitter pancake (think in between crepe and pancake) with vegetables cooked in oil and spices heaped on top, so you tear off a piece with your right hand and then you dab it in the veggies in the middle, pick some up, and try to get it all into your mouth without spilling...sounds easy enough.  It gets a little more complicated though when your ethiopian host insists on feeding you.  so sure enough, last night the night guard didn't think i was eating enough and so he proceeded to feed me two fistfuls of injera and veggies.  I felt like my ethiopian culture education had formally begun.