Saturday December 7, 2008

Joseph
Joi and I


Bole International Airport

ETHIOPIA at last!! So we arrived in Addis Ababa, and as we were flying in, amazed at how dark the sky was. Don't get me wrong, there were lights, but for a City of a couple of million people, it was fairly dark. I can honestly say that we were both excited and anxious. It was late at night, we were in a strange country, and did not know what to expect. I had heard stories about the Bole Airport, but things went smoothly for us. We departed the plane, proceeded to immigration, had our passports stamped and ended up outside of a small room where they issue the visas. That was interesting. After about twenty minutes we received our visas and while Joi went to claim our bags, I exchanged some currency. A little side note, we did not know whether or not anyone was going to meet us at the airport, as we were having troubles contacting and wiring money to the travel agent in Ethiopia. We didn't even know if we had a hotel that evening, but we didn't care, we had made it, and would have slept in any hotel if we needed to.

Anyways, we were heading out the door of the airport (A beautiful airport by the way), we saw a man in a crowd of at least two hundred people waving his sign frantically at us. The sign read "Mr. Brad." We figured it was our driver, and it was. His name was Joseph, and he was a super cool guy. We learned that we would be spending the next couple of days with him as we traveled Addis, but here it was 8:00 at night, and we were wide awake. Joseph informed us that Yetnayet, our travel agent had made arrangements at a new hotel since the hotel that we had requested was already booked for the national holiday on Monday. On our drive to the hotel, there were thousands of people in the road singing and dancing, although we had not yet heard the language, so we had no idea what they were doing." We were worried until Joseph told us that it was a muslim celebration, and assured us that we were entirely safe. It took us two hours to go less than five miles because of the crowds. It was really cool.