Charles' Ethiopian Adventure: The awesomeness that was March 14-17

So…I promised pictures of the amazing weekend. I feel I have to oblige, but I warn you that I’m still waiting on the pictures from a few of my friends who were here, which means (1) you have to put up with the lower quality photos I took and (2) you’ll have to suffer through more pictures once I get them.

As I mentioned, Thursday night was the “Pi Party” in celebration of March 14. Other people made pizza (I ate bread), and we watched the animated shorts that were nominated at the most recent Academy Awards. One of the consultant’s at ATA is Barry Levine. He was a childhood friend of Khalid Bomba (the CEO of ATA) and is a professional actor. It’s pretty cool, you can find him on IMDB “Barry Alan Levine.” He’s got 31 actor credits (not including commercials).

He came over with a team to make a documentary about ATA, and then stayed on when it became clear that the project would be benefitted with someone here full-time. He films major meetings / makes short videos about the ATA, works on documents for the government and the public, does some English translating for the Communications Team, and is redesigning the website. Anyway, he brought all the shorts, and they were a lot of fun to watch. The winner (a Disney one about a guy making paper airplanes) was good, but I really liked the one about Adam and the dog. It was probably my favorite, though the one where they made salsa out of non-food items had some cool graphics. Have I talked enough about them to make you want to watch them just to know what I’m talking about? Yes? Good, mission accomplished. Somehow I took no pictures on Thursday, so on to Friday!

Friday was slightly surreal. Addis has a decent number of diaspora (native Ethiopians who are or have studied or worked abroad). Angeles is a diaspora who spent some time over in the states and is very well connected with the ATA ex-pat crowd. I hear he even dated one of the previous SPAs (Senior Program Associate, aka my title). It was Angeles’ 31^st birthday, and he somehow arranged to have his party in the American Embassy compound at the Marine House. It was an interesting experience to walk up to the heavily guarded US Embassy (with its high walls and barbed wire) and tell security “I’m here for the party.” “Oh, it’s right over there. Let me show you.” Security did make my buddy Scott drink some of his water to prove it wasn’t something dangerous before they let us in, though.

The Marine House (or at least the part of it we saw) is just a nice bar with outside seating, a pool table inside, and Marines serving the drinks. It’s while we were at the party that Amandla and Natasha tracked us down. Somehow I also didn’t get any pictures of the party, so…I know, I know, I’m failing on the “showing you pictures” front.

After the party, everyone went to Jolly (http://jollyaddis.com/), which is a bar/restaurant/club. If you’ve ever been in a W Hotel, that’s what Jolly reminds me of – super ritzy (at least for Addis) but dim and with a lot of neon. Here I actually managed to get pictures (1 for 3 so far; a .333 average in baseball would make me an All-Star).

I kid you not. The bar has a weird rendition of the Last Supper.

Saturday, we met up for lunch at the Hilton (where Amandla/Natasha were staying). The hotel felt very fancy (even though people discount it because the Sheraton and Radisson Blu are outrageously nice), and we ate by the pool. Then, Natasha, Scott, and I went hiking up in the Entoto Mountains. It was nice to get outside of the smog of the city. It is beautiful up there. We did get caught in the rain, which I hadn’t prepared anyone for because it hadn’t rained since I got here until this weekend (weekend of March 14-17). This storm was a bit nuts as it even hailed pretty hard for a while.

Here are the shops at market where the taxi dropped us and we started walking.

Here we are walking up the road. Scott's in the white shirt. Natasha's in the grayish brown shirt. In the second picture, you can see a woman carrying wood down the mountain. We passed a lot of them. It looks like painful, back-breaking work.

Here's the crazy hail!

Here's Scott/Natasha after being rained on. Don't worry, I'm pretty sure there's an embarrassing picture of me in my $1 poncho from Walmart (looks like a large, clear trash bag) coming from either Scott or Natasha in revenge.