After we left Sara’s we joined the rest of the team who were playing with some of the children who live on Entoto mountain. I did my signature move (some might say my signature mistake), picking up a small child above my head. Kids love it. The problem of course being that every kid wants to be picked up an unlimited number of times, and the eight year olds that come up to you weigh significantly more than the four year old you picked up first. Anyway, it was fun. It had been a while since I had hung out with a mass of kids. I was only there for a short while before we packed up and headed back to the hotel and then off to dinner.

To get to and from the mountain, you drive through a market area. I’m not exactly sure how to describe the chaos there. Pedestrians, cars, buses, and the occasional donkey share the street. When we made our first short van trip from the airport to our hotel, the Addis Guest House, I thought that Ethiopian driving was right up my alley, aggressive. By the end of the day I was proven wrong. Driving here is crazy. Most of the streets have no speed limits. Of course, it doesn’t matter because you can’t usually go that fast anyway. There are too many cars, people, et cetera in the streets. I’ll try to post some pictures at some point, but nothing I’ve shot does it justice.

For dinner half the team went to the Bier Garden (for food, not beer). My half went to Kaldi’s, a Starbucks rip-off, and a good one at that.¹. They use a very similar green and white logo, and the inside could be straight out of a Starbucks. Of course, Kaldi’s serves food as well. Here I got my first taste of a hamburger in Ethiopia. I found out later that they put Ethiopian spices in the meat, giving it a distinctly un-American hamburger flavor.

And that was pretty much our first day.

¹A side note, Kaldi’s beat Starbucks in a trademark infringement lawsuit because Kaldi’s beat Starbucks into Ethiopia.