In the midst of end-of-CASA turmoil, I slipped off to Ethiopia on May 19 with my friends Miriam and Alex. It was a random trip, or so it seemed at the time, a seizing of an opportunity that would become much more expensive and logistically difficult if we waited until we no longer lived in Egypt. So we flew out that Sunday night from Cairo to Addis Ababa. Since it was before the sizzling dam news broke, it seemed to most here like a vague and peculiar destination.
We were destined to see more sunrises over the course of our ten days in Ethiopia than middays. We also had no confirmed hotel reservations when we touched down at Bole Airport in Addis at 3am. People warned us that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the African Union, which is based in Addis, and maybe there would be no rooms available. Somehow, though, we wound up in a suite at the soon-to-be beloved Addis Guest House just as the dawn call to prayer began to wail. Even in Ethiopia...
That afternoon, we went out to take stock of the city. The streets -- hilly, meandering, patternless -- were lined with low, semi-solid buildings with tin roofs. The blue and white taxis with their round headlights would not have looked out of place at a classic car show. I was struck after some time by the fact that we had not come across a single Western chain store or restaurant. (Compared with the ubiquitous Pizza Huts and KFCs in Cairo or the Starbucks in Beijing's Forbidden City, this was really kind of strange.) The signs posted in curlicue Amharic letters advertised Ethiopian movies, plays, and bands -- not foreign ones.
By minibus and foot, we made our way to Addis Ababa University. I marveled at the leafiness of it: clusters of students were buried amongst the gardens reading quietly. In the middle of campus sits the Ethnological Museum. In front of it is a set of steps leading to nowhere, a monument built by Mussolini during the five-year Italian occupation of Ethiopia to commemorate the years of Fascist rule; it is capped by the Lion of Judah, placed there by Haile Selassie when he returned to power as a reminder of who triumphed in the end. These allusions to colonial rule are rather occasional, though, as the period was so brief: the chief contributions seem to have been the macchiato, a café staple, and ciao.
The museum itself, inside Selassie's former palace, revealed Ethiopia's dizzying number of ethnic groups -- the majority Oromo, the ruling Amhara, the southern tribesmen recognizable by the enormous disks they wear in their lips, and so on. Religious diversity was also noted: 44% of Ethiopians are Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, 34% are Muslim, 19% are Protestant, and the rest are traditional animists. However, the guiding organizing principle seems to be ethnic, and that's where most conflict has arisen. Within a single tribal group, there are often both Muslims and Christians of different types. The art floor in the museum demonstrated influences from the Gulf, India, and Europe, something that might be surprising given that Ethiopia is landlocked and was hardly colonized. (We found out later, when visiting the much shabbier National Museum, that it was India that donated Haile Selassie's grandest throne... When establishing the first national education system, Selassie had hired Indian teachers for it.)
Because the Ethnological Museum was once the Emperor's palace, it was possible to visit his bedroom, a fairly modest affair given his aspirations to grandeur. A large mirror displays the bullet wound left during an attempted coup. In my usual fashion, I made sure to check out the Emperor's bathroom. The simple tiled floors and blue ceramic sink and toilet were a window onto the banality of dictatorship.
We wound our way back that afternoon past the Lion Zoo down a broad boulevard lined with government ministries, though none occupied pompous or imposing offices. Around dusk, we arrived at St. George's Cathedral atop a hill in the Piazza neighborhood. People sat on benches in the tree-spotted courtyard around the octagonal church or prostrated themselves on the steps as ethereal Amharic hymns emanated from the interior. All Ethiopian Orthodox churches, I was told later, are round or octagonal, a reference to the infinity of God. Nearby, a line of a dozen or more men crouched along the sidewalk reading newspapers in apparent unison -- it seems one does not wait to get home before cracking them open.
Nighttime in Addis was conspicuously dark. The shed-like shops that lined the streets eroded into shapelessness. We spent quite some time wandering in search of a restaurant that had been recommended, only to wind up at a fancy hamburger place clearly favored by chic Ethiopians and expats.
A few hours later we were awake again, picked up at 3:30am to go to the public bus station. Or, if you're following the Ethiopian clock, 9:30. This was one of the craziest parts of Ethiopia, a reminder that we were someplace decidedly and almost whimsically different: it has its own clock, not just its own timezone. 12 o'clock is dawn, or 6am our time. 2 o'clock, then, is 8am -- opening time for some businesses. Dusk is also 12 o'clock, or 6pm our time. This can definitely cause some problems if you're not sure whether someone is speaking in Ethiopia's time or "faranji" time (i.e. the rest of the world's).
The bus station where we were brought to seek tickets to the city of Harar, in the East, was otherworldly. It was an outdoor lot, lit only by the fluorescent bulbs above the ticket windows from which an earsplitting din emerged. They were tiny stalls, marked in Amharic with different destinations and prices, and the salesmen frantically waved tickets from behind their barred windows. Clusters of country folk in wildly patterned traditional clothing and gnarled walking sticks stood with their bundles, negotiating with bus agents. Yusuf, the friend of our guesthouse's manager who had been sent to negotiate for us, finally found us a bus to Jijiga -- the last outpost in eastern Ethiopia before Somaliland. It would stop for us in Harar on the way. (In any case, all the coach buses and flights had been full, as were all direct buses to Harar.) We waited perhaps two hours on the bus before it moved, three abreast in our seats, the aisles filled with men crouched on tree stumps. It was a wild ride, eleven hours of Ethiopian pop songs blasting from the loudspeakers and, though most roads are now paved, a considerable amount of bumping around. At some point, we spotted baboons bounding along beside the bus. People whooped excitedly and threw them the bread we'd be handed at the beginning of the trip. We stopped for a lunch break at a roadside rest stop, a shabby inn where people used to stay the night when the bus trip took two days -- that is, until 2 or 3 years ago. Our fellow male passengers returned with bulging plastic bags of qat, or, as it's known in Ethiopia, chat -- the bitter, leafy stimulant that is banned in the West and known to have drugged out most of Yemen. We'd entered the East, where chat flows as freely as the famous honey wine tej does in the North. The chewing session began, littering the bus with chat leaves. We traveled hour after hour through dramatic landscapes, from rocky deserts to wide lakes, to rolling hills dotted with tin-roofed cottages and thatched huts, to steeper mountains.
We were dropped off in the new part of Harar, which consisted of a few broad boulevards, and taken by tuk tuk, the only form of public transport, into the old city. The old city, which we had been told felt more Morocco than Ethiopia, was still contained in its 16th-century walls, with an entrance marked by a painting of a long-dead turbaned emir and an unidentifiable, perhaps Fascist, metal monument. A favorite local story is that of Sir Richard Burton's successful attempt at penetrating walled Harar, then a city forbidden to Europeans, disguised as an Arab merchant. According to our somewhat swaggering guide Amiri, the owner of the guesthouse where we were staying, Burton camped out for two weeks in a neighboring village and miraculously managed to master the Harari language in that time.
Harar was, in any case, a critical trading center for centuries and had a notably large Indian commercial presence for a long time. It is mostly Muslim, with 82 mosques within the old city, and many people speak Arabic. Assalaamu aleikum, keef al hal? said one teenage boy to me in the kind of formal Arabic one would learn studying the Qur'an. Inside the city, people speak Harari, while the surrounding farmers speak Oromo. There is also Somali influence, as goods arrive in Harar via the Somaliland port just as Islam once did from the Arabian Peninsula.
Our late-night walk through the chat-littered streets truly felt like we were at the edge of the world. People's features were indistinguishable in the blackness, just the swish of the women's colored dresses and the bundles of firewood they balanced on their heads; and the shifting of shapeless forms under blankets alongside the Friday Mosque. The Fresh Touch restaurant in the New City was a reminder that we were not so far away after all: it was our first delicious Ethiopian meal in-country with the spongy bread injera and the meat and egg dish kitfo, but also clearly the place where the few foreigners in town come to dine.
We stayed in the Amiri Cultural Harari Guesthouse, one of the oblong whitewashed homes of the old city perched on a hillside with views of the surrounding mountains and valleys. The interior was covered in red carpets and pillows, with a loft for sleeping. Amiri himself was arrogant but knowledgeable. He proudly announced to us that he speaks five languages and has 3 wives and 26 brothers and sisters. For breakfast on our first and only full day, he brought us to a cafe where we were served flaky melawwah bread (something that seems to have made it from Yemen to Morocco, a classic) topped with honey and eggs. Then we set off on a walking tour of the old city, beginning on Machine Street. This path is lined with fabric shops and people crouched outside beside their ancient sewing machines. We came out at the Meat Market, where Amiri purchased bits of raw meat and we stood in the adjacent courtyard with outstretched hands to feed the vultures. The arched arcades where the meat merchants hung their wares did, in fact, remind me of Morocco, as did the brightly painted greens, purples, teals, and yellows of the stuccoed houses. People paint their houses anew every Ramadan, said Amiri, choosing a different color each time.
We stopped for coffee, Harar's specialty, and a gooey sweet called heloo in a miniature cafe alongside the main market. A man on the stool across from us shook his head: You're all so white! he marveled. Kids ran by with old-fashioned toys: one boy pushed a metal hoop with a stick, another pulled a homemade train. Farangi, farangi! came the refrain. Foreigners, foreigners! And, almost as frequently: Money! Money!
Nearby, outside the back gates, was the cattle market. It was an off-day: twenty or so giant cows pawed the dust, waiting for buyers. Normally an ox would go for 15,000 Birr, about $800 at 18.5 Birr to the dollar. Amiri boasted that he buys one every year to share with villagers. As we walked back inside, he also told us that Hararis liked the Italians. They had built up the city's infrastructure and repaired relations between the urban Hararis and the Oromo farmers. We moved on to the shrine of Emir Nur, typical of Sufi shrines in that it was capped with a tall, green, beehive-like top. According to Amiri, Harari Islam is highly influenced by Sufism but does not have any religious hierarchy.
Later on, on our own, we visited the Sherif Harar City Museum. The house was more interesting than its contents. Belonging to Ras Tafari (Haile Selassie) before his ascension to the throne, it was a grand white structure with broad wooden verandas decorated with Indian flavor. My friends had had enough of dusty paraphernalia after this visit, so I set off on my own back through the old city and around the exterior walls. A strange find, apparently a crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane, was apparently an abandoned project for a unique restaurant. Gaggles of children pretended to fight me, then asked for money. After another viewing of a dusty museum, guided in improvised sign language, I wandered into the courtyard of Medhane Alem Cathedral. I had heard the same ethereal hymns wafting down the "Main Asphalt" and followed the sound. I took a seat on one of the benches to listen, beside an old man and his toddler. Ancient-looking women wrapped in white lined the other benches, the same white that the priests wear, though they wrap the cloth as a toga. The church itself was painted whimsical shades of baby blue and pink. After 45 minutes or so, the loudspeakers went quiet and the priests emerged onto a pink outdoor altar painted with Amharic Bible verses. A small boy picked up a drum about his own size and began to beat it in accompaniment with the lulling chants of the priests.
I went home before dusk, because I didn't want to miss the hyena feeding ritual about which I had heard. Amiri took us down behind the city walls again, to a religious shrine where the show -- which only dates back about twenty years -- of the domesticated hyena takes place every night. When we arrived, a handful of people had already gathered, and the headlights of a tuk tuk illuminated a young man crouched in the dust beside a basket of entrails. He was dangling a piece of raw meat on a stick, and a hyena was ambling towards him. Afterward, he called on Alex to sit beside him, and the hyena circled back again. When it was my turn, I couldn't see the animal behind me or the meat hanging just above my hair. Suddenly I felt a heavy thump on my shoulders and saw two enormous spotted paws. My instinct was to laugh hysterically and sort of keel over: I had no reaction prepared for being bear-hugged by a hungry hyena.
We were destined to see more sunrises over the course of our ten days in Ethiopia than middays. We also had no confirmed hotel reservations when we touched down at Bole Airport in Addis at 3am. People warned us that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the African Union, which is based in Addis, and maybe there would be no rooms available. Somehow, though, we wound up in a suite at the soon-to-be beloved Addis Guest House just as the dawn call to prayer began to wail. Even in Ethiopia...
That afternoon, we went out to take stock of the city. The streets -- hilly, meandering, patternless -- were lined with low, semi-solid buildings with tin roofs. The blue and white taxis with their round headlights would not have looked out of place at a classic car show. I was struck after some time by the fact that we had not come across a single Western chain store or restaurant. (Compared with the ubiquitous Pizza Huts and KFCs in Cairo or the Starbucks in Beijing's Forbidden City, this was really kind of strange.) The signs posted in curlicue Amharic letters advertised Ethiopian movies, plays, and bands -- not foreign ones.
By minibus and foot, we made our way to Addis Ababa University. I marveled at the leafiness of it: clusters of students were buried amongst the gardens reading quietly. In the middle of campus sits the Ethnological Museum. In front of it is a set of steps leading to nowhere, a monument built by Mussolini during the five-year Italian occupation of Ethiopia to commemorate the years of Fascist rule; it is capped by the Lion of Judah, placed there by Haile Selassie when he returned to power as a reminder of who triumphed in the end. These allusions to colonial rule are rather occasional, though, as the period was so brief: the chief contributions seem to have been the macchiato, a café staple, and ciao.
Addis Ababa University -- Haven't seen this much green in a long time!
The museum itself, inside Selassie's former palace, revealed Ethiopia's dizzying number of ethnic groups -- the majority Oromo, the ruling Amhara, the southern tribesmen recognizable by the enormous disks they wear in their lips, and so on. Religious diversity was also noted: 44% of Ethiopians are Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, 34% are Muslim, 19% are Protestant, and the rest are traditional animists. However, the guiding organizing principle seems to be ethnic, and that's where most conflict has arisen. Within a single tribal group, there are often both Muslims and Christians of different types. The art floor in the museum demonstrated influences from the Gulf, India, and Europe, something that might be surprising given that Ethiopia is landlocked and was hardly colonized. (We found out later, when visiting the much shabbier National Museum, that it was India that donated Haile Selassie's grandest throne... When establishing the first national education system, Selassie had hired Indian teachers for it.)
Because the Ethnological Museum was once the Emperor's palace, it was possible to visit his bedroom, a fairly modest affair given his aspirations to grandeur. A large mirror displays the bullet wound left during an attempted coup. In my usual fashion, I made sure to check out the Emperor's bathroom. The simple tiled floors and blue ceramic sink and toilet were a window onto the banality of dictatorship.
The Emperor's Bathroom
We wound our way back that afternoon past the Lion Zoo down a broad boulevard lined with government ministries, though none occupied pompous or imposing offices. Around dusk, we arrived at St. George's Cathedral atop a hill in the Piazza neighborhood. People sat on benches in the tree-spotted courtyard around the octagonal church or prostrated themselves on the steps as ethereal Amharic hymns emanated from the interior. All Ethiopian Orthodox churches, I was told later, are round or octagonal, a reference to the infinity of God. Nearby, a line of a dozen or more men crouched along the sidewalk reading newspapers in apparent unison -- it seems one does not wait to get home before cracking them open.
Nighttime in Addis was conspicuously dark. The shed-like shops that lined the streets eroded into shapelessness. We spent quite some time wandering in search of a restaurant that had been recommended, only to wind up at a fancy hamburger place clearly favored by chic Ethiopians and expats.
A few hours later we were awake again, picked up at 3:30am to go to the public bus station. Or, if you're following the Ethiopian clock, 9:30. This was one of the craziest parts of Ethiopia, a reminder that we were someplace decidedly and almost whimsically different: it has its own clock, not just its own timezone. 12 o'clock is dawn, or 6am our time. 2 o'clock, then, is 8am -- opening time for some businesses. Dusk is also 12 o'clock, or 6pm our time. This can definitely cause some problems if you're not sure whether someone is speaking in Ethiopia's time or "faranji" time (i.e. the rest of the world's).
The bus station where we were brought to seek tickets to the city of Harar, in the East, was otherworldly. It was an outdoor lot, lit only by the fluorescent bulbs above the ticket windows from which an earsplitting din emerged. They were tiny stalls, marked in Amharic with different destinations and prices, and the salesmen frantically waved tickets from behind their barred windows. Clusters of country folk in wildly patterned traditional clothing and gnarled walking sticks stood with their bundles, negotiating with bus agents. Yusuf, the friend of our guesthouse's manager who had been sent to negotiate for us, finally found us a bus to Jijiga -- the last outpost in eastern Ethiopia before Somaliland. It would stop for us in Harar on the way. (In any case, all the coach buses and flights had been full, as were all direct buses to Harar.) We waited perhaps two hours on the bus before it moved, three abreast in our seats, the aisles filled with men crouched on tree stumps. It was a wild ride, eleven hours of Ethiopian pop songs blasting from the loudspeakers and, though most roads are now paved, a considerable amount of bumping around. At some point, we spotted baboons bounding along beside the bus. People whooped excitedly and threw them the bread we'd be handed at the beginning of the trip. We stopped for a lunch break at a roadside rest stop, a shabby inn where people used to stay the night when the bus trip took two days -- that is, until 2 or 3 years ago. Our fellow male passengers returned with bulging plastic bags of qat, or, as it's known in Ethiopia, chat -- the bitter, leafy stimulant that is banned in the West and known to have drugged out most of Yemen. We'd entered the East, where chat flows as freely as the famous honey wine tej does in the North. The chewing session began, littering the bus with chat leaves. We traveled hour after hour through dramatic landscapes, from rocky deserts to wide lakes, to rolling hills dotted with tin-roofed cottages and thatched huts, to steeper mountains.
First baboon sighting of the trip. Many more to follow.
We were dropped off in the new part of Harar, which consisted of a few broad boulevards, and taken by tuk tuk, the only form of public transport, into the old city. The old city, which we had been told felt more Morocco than Ethiopia, was still contained in its 16th-century walls, with an entrance marked by a painting of a long-dead turbaned emir and an unidentifiable, perhaps Fascist, metal monument. A favorite local story is that of Sir Richard Burton's successful attempt at penetrating walled Harar, then a city forbidden to Europeans, disguised as an Arab merchant. According to our somewhat swaggering guide Amiri, the owner of the guesthouse where we were staying, Burton camped out for two weeks in a neighboring village and miraculously managed to master the Harari language in that time.
Harar was, in any case, a critical trading center for centuries and had a notably large Indian commercial presence for a long time. It is mostly Muslim, with 82 mosques within the old city, and many people speak Arabic. Assalaamu aleikum, keef al hal? said one teenage boy to me in the kind of formal Arabic one would learn studying the Qur'an. Inside the city, people speak Harari, while the surrounding farmers speak Oromo. There is also Somali influence, as goods arrive in Harar via the Somaliland port just as Islam once did from the Arabian Peninsula.
Our late-night walk through the chat-littered streets truly felt like we were at the edge of the world. People's features were indistinguishable in the blackness, just the swish of the women's colored dresses and the bundles of firewood they balanced on their heads; and the shifting of shapeless forms under blankets alongside the Friday Mosque. The Fresh Touch restaurant in the New City was a reminder that we were not so far away after all: it was our first delicious Ethiopian meal in-country with the spongy bread injera and the meat and egg dish kitfo, but also clearly the place where the few foreigners in town come to dine.
Harari women carry loads of firewood through the old city
We stayed in the Amiri Cultural Harari Guesthouse, one of the oblong whitewashed homes of the old city perched on a hillside with views of the surrounding mountains and valleys. The interior was covered in red carpets and pillows, with a loft for sleeping. Amiri himself was arrogant but knowledgeable. He proudly announced to us that he speaks five languages and has 3 wives and 26 brothers and sisters. For breakfast on our first and only full day, he brought us to a cafe where we were served flaky melawwah bread (something that seems to have made it from Yemen to Morocco, a classic) topped with honey and eggs. Then we set off on a walking tour of the old city, beginning on Machine Street. This path is lined with fabric shops and people crouched outside beside their ancient sewing machines. We came out at the Meat Market, where Amiri purchased bits of raw meat and we stood in the adjacent courtyard with outstretched hands to feed the vultures. The arched arcades where the meat merchants hung their wares did, in fact, remind me of Morocco, as did the brightly painted greens, purples, teals, and yellows of the stuccoed houses. People paint their houses anew every Ramadan, said Amiri, choosing a different color each time.
A sampling of the colors of Harar
A young man teaches me how to properly feed vultures
We stopped for coffee, Harar's specialty, and a gooey sweet called heloo in a miniature cafe alongside the main market. A man on the stool across from us shook his head: You're all so white! he marveled. Kids ran by with old-fashioned toys: one boy pushed a metal hoop with a stick, another pulled a homemade train. Farangi, farangi! came the refrain. Foreigners, foreigners! And, almost as frequently: Money! Money!
Nearby, outside the back gates, was the cattle market. It was an off-day: twenty or so giant cows pawed the dust, waiting for buyers. Normally an ox would go for 15,000 Birr, about $800 at 18.5 Birr to the dollar. Amiri boasted that he buys one every year to share with villagers. As we walked back inside, he also told us that Hararis liked the Italians. They had built up the city's infrastructure and repaired relations between the urban Hararis and the Oromo farmers. We moved on to the shrine of Emir Nur, typical of Sufi shrines in that it was capped with a tall, green, beehive-like top. According to Amiri, Harari Islam is highly influenced by Sufism but does not have any religious hierarchy.
Later on, on our own, we visited the Sherif Harar City Museum. The house was more interesting than its contents. Belonging to Ras Tafari (Haile Selassie) before his ascension to the throne, it was a grand white structure with broad wooden verandas decorated with Indian flavor. My friends had had enough of dusty paraphernalia after this visit, so I set off on my own back through the old city and around the exterior walls. A strange find, apparently a crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane, was apparently an abandoned project for a unique restaurant. Gaggles of children pretended to fight me, then asked for money. After another viewing of a dusty museum, guided in improvised sign language, I wandered into the courtyard of Medhane Alem Cathedral. I had heard the same ethereal hymns wafting down the "Main Asphalt" and followed the sound. I took a seat on one of the benches to listen, beside an old man and his toddler. Ancient-looking women wrapped in white lined the other benches, the same white that the priests wear, though they wrap the cloth as a toga. The church itself was painted whimsical shades of baby blue and pink. After 45 minutes or so, the loudspeakers went quiet and the priests emerged onto a pink outdoor altar painted with Amharic Bible verses. A small boy picked up a drum about his own size and began to beat it in accompaniment with the lulling chants of the priests.
I went home before dusk, because I didn't want to miss the hyena feeding ritual about which I had heard. Amiri took us down behind the city walls again, to a religious shrine where the show -- which only dates back about twenty years -- of the domesticated hyena takes place every night. When we arrived, a handful of people had already gathered, and the headlights of a tuk tuk illuminated a young man crouched in the dust beside a basket of entrails. He was dangling a piece of raw meat on a stick, and a hyena was ambling towards him. Afterward, he called on Alex to sit beside him, and the hyena circled back again. When it was my turn, I couldn't see the animal behind me or the meat hanging just above my hair. Suddenly I felt a heavy thump on my shoulders and saw two enormous spotted paws. My instinct was to laugh hysterically and sort of keel over: I had no reaction prepared for being bear-hugged by a hungry hyena.
Feeding the hyenas - initial shock
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