May 4, 2024 Saturday

Our Trip Experience Leader

The night before, at the airport, we met Melaku, our Trip Experience Leader. The photo above is from days later at a restaurant. I wanted a picture of the restaurant’s name and John caught Melaku in the doorway. In some ways it looks like a surveillance photo, but this really is one of the better ones I have of him.

In previous weeks, we’d exchanged an email with him and had a phone call, so he wasn’t a total mystery to us. After we got to the hotel and before he sent us to our rooms, he asked us to meet him in the lobby at 9 a.m. the following day to decide what we would do. Remember, we arrived in Ethiopia the day before the tour began. Technically, Melaku wasn’t on the clock, but he acted like he was, and for that, I was eternally grateful. He took his group under his wing from when we landed until he let us go to the airport on the last day.

John and I slept until 8:30 and managed to get downstairs by 9. Melaku explained that our choices were to go to a place where pottery was made, a jewelry store owned by an entrepreneurial woman, or Unity Park. I felt ambiguous about the pottery place but was good with whatever the group decided. We decided on our destinations as we went.

Unfortunately, John and I had not eaten breakfast yet. Melaku suggested we go right then because the buffet ran until 10. You don’t want to get breakfast at 9:45 at a buffet that ends at 10. Everything was cold and stale, but we ate enough.

First excursion

Melaku met us at the restaurant to tell us that the taxi would cost $50 per person, and we all agreed that it was too much. Then he said he’d gotten a friend to help drive, and Melaku offered to take some of us in his car. That was so generous of him. He asked us for a small amount of money to pay his friend. He may have taken some of it before giving his friend his share, but I didn’t know that, and I was okay either way.

The group decided to go to the pottery place called the Ensira Pottery Center, which I enjoyed. Unfortunately, it was the day before Easter Sunday, so there was a lot of activity in the city, but not many people working at the pottery factory.

Melaku called and was told they were open, but not as many people were working as he had thought that meant. Nevertheless, one woman was there, and she showed us how she threw a pot on a pottery wheel and shaped the clay into a coffee pot. Melaku explained that the coffee pots were different depending on the part of the country in which they were made. Some had multiple spouts, and some had only one. The one we saw being shaped had one spout.

Inside the building with the pottery wheels were a lot of pots sitting around drying.

 

Melaku called and was told they were open, but not as many people were working as he had thought that meant. Nevertheless, one woman was there, and she showed us how she threw a pot on a pottery wheel and shaped the clay into a coffee pot. Melaku explained that the coffee pots were different depending on the part of the country in which they were made. Some had multiple spouts, and some had only one. The one we saw being shaped had one spout.

Firing the dried clay product

Next, Melaku and another woman took us to another building to see where they fired the dried clay pots. They do it the old-fashioned way with a cow dung fire because cow dung burns very hot. She said you had to wait until the pot was glowing red before you took it out, and then she showed us how to use a stick stuck into the pot’s spout to move the pot from the fire to a piece of corrugated steel in the corner to cool.

She also showed us that if you put the pot in sawdust to cool it, it turns black instead of brown, which the usual cooling process produces. It was fascinating. She let Micah and Sam each take a pot out of the fire.

Gift shop

It’s not a genuine tour if you don’t go through the gift shop even in Ethiopia. We went to look at their shop, where they charged Birr 200 to enter. That’s about four dollars. Being charged to go in the gift shop isn’t something they do at most places. Maybe they figure they have captive tourists and might as well make some money off them even if they don’t buy anything. I did buy something. I bought a cute little painted clay chicken for Birr 100. You can see I am an extravagant shopper when I travel. The little chicken will be sweet on the table in the living room with our China cups and teapot.

Unity Park

Then Melaku drove six of us to Unity Park to the park—our five and Roger, one more person on the trip with us. Melaku left us at the park and took Ebony, Josephine, and Janet to the jewelry shop. Janet had arrived the day before we did.

Google says about Unity Park: “Unity Park’s traditional garden beautifully displays over 43 indigenous plants. The spacious green area has a botanical garden of various plants. At the lion zoo, primates and endemic, including black-mane lions, roam, and 46 other types of species and 312 individual animals are in the separate zoo.”

The park was beautiful with some historical buildings, including the Palace built by Emperor Menelik II and a zoo where we saw a black lion, which isn’t entirely black but has a full black mane. I looked very majestic. I understood why the early rulers of the country took the black lion as their emblem. We also saw the pride of regular lions and cheetahs.

Roger paid for the VIP tour, which included a guide and a walk through the palace. We did not. It was an extra $30 times five, more than we wanted to spend. After walking around in the gardens, we came to an intersection. We talked to some park employees who directed us one way because we didn’t pay for the VIP tour and called for a guide for Roger.

It was here that we decided to split up with Roger. He went his way, and we went ours. We all hoped he got back to the hotel okay. He was a bit concerned about that, as I would have been. Even Micah was concerned about him. We saw him later in the hotel, so he did make it back.

Lunchtime

We could have eaten lunch at the park, but Micah wanted to return to the hotel. I don’t think he trusted the restaurants, and rightly so, probably in some cases. I thought the park would be safe, but he wanted to return to the hotel to eat, so we didn’t eat until we did.

As we were walking in the park, the weather got cloudy and cooler. We had a little thunder and lightning. It started to sprinkle, and we decided we’d seen enough. The park was close enough to the hotel to walk back, which we did. Becky was pretty sure she knew the route and she got us there. Good on Becky. John and I held on to each other because that small amount of rain made parts of the sidewalk slippery. I was glad when we got back to the hotel. My knees were not bothering me as much as the day we spent wandering around Istanbul, but I was happy to be off them.

Home Sweet Home

We went back to the rooms to dry off. I was glad I’d worn an overshirt, which I’d thrown in the bag as an afterthought. By this time, I’d worn both of them and was glad to have had them. I need to remember that for future trips.

We met Becky and the boys at the hotel restaurant at 2:30. They had one patron there. We ordered way too much food. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had soup and salad, John had a Panini, Becky had a bowl of soup, and the boys both had fish and chips. So much food. It took forever to get it to the table. I said they must have had to pluck the chicken and catch the fish.

But we had a good conversation at the table while we waited. When the food finally came, we were very ready to eat. Becky ate some of John’s sandwich, Micah had some of Sam’s fish and chips, and I ate half of what I ordered. It was a community table.

An interesting application of take-out

I asked a waiter if I could take John’s panini back to the room. The very nice young man said he could bring it to our room. He didn’t seem to have any way to bag it and give it to us. Well, okay. He followed us to our room with a tray and John’s plated panini under a metal plate cover on the tray. When we got to the room, I told the waiter that our mini-refrigerator wasn’t working. He said he’d let mechanical know.

About an hour later, a woman knocked on the door and brought us a replacement refrigerator. That worked for me. Finally, the sandwich was in the fridge and probably wouldn’t kill us if we ate it. That was both lunch and dinner for me. I was stuffed.

Sleep began calling to me, too. I was trying to put off going to sleep until some reasonable hour. If I napped, I was afraid I wouldn’t sleep that night. We’d done well with not having too much jet lag. And so far, the altitude had not been a problem. We’d been there a day, and you’d think we would have felt it by then.

I told John we might walk around when I finish writing to keep me awake. He said we had not seen Becky’s room. She had told us it was enormous, more square feet than ours, and we have a very generously sized room. We were on the sixth floor, and she and the boys were on the eighth.

Visiting the family

We walked to her room and ended up watching the movie Hunger Games on her laptop with them. Becky had rented it for the boys to watch. That kept us awake until a reasonable hour, and we returned to our room to sleep.

That was the end of Day 0 of our trip to Ethiopia. The upcoming day is Day 1, which includes a trip to the ZOMA museum, our orientation dinner, and a walk around the hotel neighborhood.