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Published: June 16th 2017
Bahir Dar Market
Pottery made by the Falasha's - the remaining Jewish population in Ethiopia.Geo: 11.6, 37.3833
We started the day when we were awakened by the call to prayer from the nearby Mosque. The pension is about a block from it and we are on side of the building closest to the mosque. I have never experienced this before - they do the first call before the roosters start crowing so I think it must have started about 3-3:30am. (Note: each day since has been a bit different so not sure what the rule is based on day of week).
We started the day out slowly trying to find an internet 'shop' - no internet cafes here - lot's of coffee cafes though. This turned out to be more of a challenge than we were expecting. There are lots of places with internet but only a few that have any kind of a connection that works fast enough to keep me from pulling my hair out. This likely means we will not load any photos until I get back to the US - sorry folks. The photos are amazing and will really bring these stories to life. Maybe some of you will perservere and come back😊
Anyway, the afternoon on our first day, we met our guide
Bahir Dar Market
Making shoes from old tires. - Abebe, who 'picked us up' at the bus station yesterday. He is 17 and in the 10th grade, speaks English very well and was not pushy - simply eager to prove he would do a good job for us. Actually, no one here has been particulaly pushy, unlike some experiences we had read. (more on that later).
Abebe walked us to the local market. This is truly the place the locals go to shop - nothing for tourists here except experiencing the real day to day life of Ethiopians in this area. There were local honey and butter makers; cobblers who make sandals from old tires - this is a big deal here as most people in the country don't wear shoes at all and they walk miles and miles carrying heavy loads. There were also grains, vegetables etc and the standard sheep, donkeys and cattle needed to carry out day to day business. We stopped at a local barber so Richard could get his hair cut. For those of you who have not met Richard, he has very little hair and likes to keep it practically shaved so for him 3 days growth is 'getting long'. I have a
Richard gets a hair cut
What is the barber going to use the comb for???? great photo of the barber using his clippers and holding a huge, bright red comb in his hand - I kept wondering what he was planning to do with it but he never laid it down.
Tonight we went to a traditional Ethiopian music place and enjoyed the funny songs and the crazed dancing. Ethiopian dancing is like nothing I have seen before except for the odd move reminiscent of the most incredible Michael Jackson double-jointed stuff. Farengi's are invited to dance, which of course we did, I am actually pretty good at the shoulder jerking/shaking stuff and can do the head/neck side to side thing - the locals were impressed so that got us going even more. I have always wanted to be able to do that loud, high, la-la-la thing that African women do, so after a few beers (theme) I was doing it really well. That led to teaching them how to do the Mexican 'rrrrrrrrrr' sound - which they couldn't do but they laughed a lot and everyone had a great time.
Walking back to the pension we had our first (and hopefully only) bad experience. We were followed by 6-8 young boys - ages 10-12-ish and initially
Bahir Dar Market
We can not resist visiting the local markets. We never tire of it. they just started with the usual banter - 'Where you from' etc. We typically are happy to chat along this way until they start asking for something, which they did - 'money, money, money'. We ignored them and they started yelling 'f...-you' (we were forwarned about this, many people have written about it. We were fine with it until one of them poked me. I turned around and yelled, 'No, Don't ever do that!' You should have seen the looks on their faces. They stopped dead in their tracks and their eyes were as wide as they could be. I doubt they have ever had a white woman yell at them. They did not follow us from there. We still had a ways to go to the pension so I felt we were watching over our shoulders the rest of the way. It was disconcerting but I doubt they would have hurt us. This is the kind of behavior that western travellers have really brought upon themselves because of our tendency to give 'hand-outs'. It can lead to very bad things.
New travel factoid: Besides a different calendar, Ethiopians also have their own way of keeping time so although for westerners,
Bahir Dar Market
Lentils, grains and salt! the time here is officially GMT +3, for Ethiopians the time is kept starting at 12:00 - 1 hour after sunrise is 1 o'clock, 2 hours after sunrise is 2 o'clock and so on. Essentially, it is 6 hours different from our watches but you have to be careful because many people will give you the time in 'local' time and you have to double check. For example, we changed rooms at our pension and we asked the front desk what time the room would be ready and she said, 'at 4'. When we asked if she mean our time or her time, she laughed and said her time, which was actually 10am for us - a wait of only 2 hours at the time, not the whole day.
I am going to do these updates by date. That way, you might not get tired of reading......
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Pam
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Carole, cannot ever get tired of reading these postings! Please keep them coming. Really can't wait for pictures!