One week

It is Tuesday morning, one week after our arrival in Addis Ababa. We are in vacation mode - sleeping at a hotel, dining out every night, doing everything together as a group, clothing still in suitcases, and lounging poolside for a few hours each day. It is fun, but is not the same as actually residing in Ethiopia. Achieving that is going to require settling into a house.

• Food

We have achieved our goal of eating Ethiopian food at nearly every evening meal. We try the Doro Wat at each place for a standard reference, get a non-spicy dish for the kids, and then do our best to find novelties, like vegetables. Where the menu allows it, the kids will get spaghetti (whose presence is a legacy of Italy's brief occupation of Ethiopia ~1940) or burgers (America's legacy to the world).

Two nights ago, Sunday, we went to a Beat Kitfo (Kitfo house) recommended by our taxi-driver-realtor John. We entered the compound and stood milling together in the small courtyard that connected three dining areas to the outside air. Waiters squeezed past us carrying food. Diners came back into the courtyard from their tables to use the hand washing basin. We waited for a host or some instruction, trying to figure out the seating policy and failing utterly, until finally one of the waiters indicated that we should pick our own table and sit anywhere.

Kitfo is spiced minced beef, served raw, partially cooked, or fully cooked. A manager with decent English helped us with our order - two spiced and two unspiced, both fully cooked. I'm not sure we'll ever be ready for uncooked. The food arrived quickly, which is usual for Ethiopian dining. The waitress set out four small ceramic bowls lined with cut rounds of banana leaf and put two large spoonfuls of Kitfo into each, forming a mound of brown, glistening meat. Then another waitress put three dollops of cheese on top of each mound of Kitfo, white, white with flecks of green, and totally green. Accompanying it was Injera, the standard spongy bread/utensil, another bread made from Enset (like plantain, often called "false banana") leaves left underground for 20 days, and a toasted version of the same. It was a lot of food. And we had a difficult time eating it. I was feeling a little unwell and wasn't at my normal dining aptitude. None of us cared for the cheeses, which were all based on the same traditional cottage cheese which is watery and sharp. None of us like the banana bread, except Miriam who enjoyed the toasted version.

When we were done with the meal, there was a lot of food left on the table. We got the manager's attention and tried to look apologetic as we told him "We're done." He did not mask his disappointment looking at our table. We paid quickly and hurried to the door.

We were relieved to get out of the restaurant. We walked up the side streets to the Asmara road where we had seen a promising ice cream place, one of the Saay Pastry franchises around the city. We got ice creams and everyone sat outside while I crossed the street to find a phone to call a taxi. There was none at the seedy bar the ice cream manager had pointed out, but next door the proprietor of a pastry shop made the local call on his cell and charged me 1.5 birr (18cents) to talk for a minute.

Last night we looked at the restaurant at the Taitu Hotel. There was no one there so we went to our backup restaurant, a strictly Italian place called Oroscopo. We had a delicious meal of overcooked spaghetti, cheesy lasagna, and yeasty pizza. They served a hot sauce of ground pepperoncini, which I had never come across and which was lovely. We met a Swiss-French traveler, shaped like a bulldog, who told us of his trip to Djibouti, including a 2 day wait for the train that never came.