Ethiopia – Addis Ababa – New Flower, Old Everything Else

Addis Ababa means “new flower” in English, and this New Flower is the capital of one very old country. Addis got its name through King Menelik II’s wife, who found a new flower growing where the Sheraton now stands in the city, and coined the name of the city after the discovery. Although that discovery was new, most famous discoveries made in Ethiopia are of very old things. Perhaps most famously and most old is Lucy (so named because Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was playing at the dig campsite just after the discovery), the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found by Dr. Leakey, who was found in Ethiopia’s swath of the Great Rift Valley. Also found here was Selam (“Peace”), the oldest child hominid ever found. The Great Rift Valley has yielded bones of human ancestors that are anywhere from 200,000 to 10 million years old. Like I said, Ethiopia is OLD.





Also, did you know that Ethiopia is home to the Ark of the Covenant? It is kept under lock and key by the Orthodox high priests in Axum in the north. Axum used to be a major center of the ancient kingdom of Abyssinia, ruled over by the Queen of Sheba. We have been told that King Menelik I, who was the son of King Solomon of Jerusalem and the Queen of Sheba, brought it here from Jerusalem for safekeeping way back in the day. Mehron and I will go to high five the guards of its resting place when we take our trip up north to see Lalibela later this month, since I highly doubt they’re going to let just anyone waltz in there to see it, especially the annoying crazy Canadian girls who are humming the Indiana Jones theme song as loud as they can while they pretend to be awesome archaeologist-adventurers! You think I’m joking. But I really really love Indiana Jones.

Ethiopia is also the birthplace of two very cool things that have equally been around forever. 1) Coffee, which originates from Kaffa in the south. I had my first coffee here in Addis at Peacock, a coffeeshop that is an institution in this city. The waiters are lifers; they are all about a hundred years old and they know their business. I don’t like coffee, but this isn’t coffee, it’s Mekyato (Amharic rendition of macchiato) and it’s worth a try. 2) The Nile. World mystery solved: the source of the Nile is here. Lake Tana is the spring of the Blue Nile, which we will also be seeing on our roadtrip north. Wicked!

Here’s a little more on day to day happenings in Addis… we seem to get invitations and have errands to run every day, so we really don’t lack for things to do. Last week Mehr and I and some of her family attended the screening of three short films being presented at Alliance Francaise. The first film was in Dutch and left us confused as to what had happened. The second movie was a dreadful melodramatic South African piece that would have put a telenovela to shame. And the third (the one we really went to see) was a very well done story about an Ethiopian man trying to survive the days of the Derg (the communist dictatorship that ruled Ethiopia from the 1970s to 1991), but it had a very unsatisfying ending.

And somehow at the end of the evening, we wound up meeting an Ethiopian movie star who invited us to the premiere of his new movie, A Guy’s Thing 2 (sequel to the bestselling A Guy’s Thing). We ended up going and despite the movie being entirely in Amharic, I found it really funny because it was mostly physical comedy and you could piece the plot together by all the angry pregnant ladies running around.



We also attended (though did not participate) in the Great Ethiopian Run, a 10km marathon around Addis with 30,000 participants at 10,000 ft of elevation. It was something to see...



Another evening we met up with one of Mehr’s mom’s friends who was in town from Nairobi with two interns. We wandered around exploring the shops in Piassa, the main window shopping district (so many jewelry stores!) before we went for dinner at Castelli’s which is famous for having hosted Brangelina for dinner when they adopted Zahara and for having the world’s rudest owners. We did not see Brad or Angie at dinner and the hosts were astonishingly rude, but the food was delish and the waitstaff were really great. Eg: when introducing ourselves, they responded with “Holly? Like Holi-day? Ohhh, like Holly-wood!”. Or better yet to Mehr, “I knew you were Ethiopian… you’re too beautiful not to be!” So funny.

Our other major restaurant outing was to Fasika with Mehr’s relatives to see some Ethiopian dancing. After going back and forth on whether we would need reservations and whether it would be better to go to another place called Habesha, we found ourselves front and center in the restaurant with the dancers and the band. I have no idea what half the things I ate were, as we all shared a communal injera plate of twenty different kinds of meat and vegetable sauces, but they were tasty. The dancing was the real highlight though… Ethiopian dance focuses on the shoulders and at times, I had to wonder if they have extra joints up there to accomplish some of their moves. And at one point, one woman mindblowingly spun her head such that I was sure it would go flying off.



Ouch. Amazing. Also, Mehr’s dad definitely got into a dance-off with one of the male dancers, so after that, we knew it was time to call it a night!

The other major event of the last week was Fidel’s birthday party, which he throws on Mount Entoto with tents and food and horse races and the whole nine yards. Every year, 50 or 60 people show up and party on the mountain with him for the afternoon and we were invited. They race all the horses, they eat, they drink, they laugh, then they go home all merry.

Unfortunately, I did not get to do any of those things because I had to go and get food poisoning on the morning of the party. Clever.