Travel to Ethiopia

Four days and 2 continents later, we are in Ethiopia.  It took 15 hours of international flight time (8 hours from Washington, DC to Rome, Italy), an hour in Rome to clean and refuel the plane, and then another 6 hours from Rome to Ethiopia.  I’m not sure of exactly the correct mileage, but it is in the neighborhood of 8000 miles I have traveled to get here.  8000 miles – staggering to think about that!

I have never traveled East (ie. across the Atlantic Ocean), so I have never had the experience of moving so dramatically across time zones.  What an experience that is!  It was weird to lose ½ of a day out of your life and find yourself eating dinner when you feel like you should be eating breakfast.   Ugh.

We arrived in Addis around 9 pm.  Unfortunately, we had to stand in line for another 2 hours to get our transit visas, check out with our 60 bags, etc.  Now it is 11 pm.  By the time we got to the International Guest House, it was after midnight.  However, we arrived to a spaghetti dinner (with smoothies to drink) waiting for us!  Dinner at midnight?

By now it is the New Year, so our hosts prepared a bonfire outside with fireworks and non-alcoholic champagne to help us ring in the New Year.  How do you say, “Thank you, but I’d rather just go to bed,” when they’ve gone to all of that trouble for you?  We finally went to bed around 2:30 am!

Just a note about my experience on Ethiopian Airlines:  I can’t quite describe how compact the airplane we flew on was.  I’m not kidding.  There couldn’t have been more than 8-10 inches of clearance between the front of one seat and the back of the seat in front of it!  I felt sorry for the six foot plus guys on our team.  And try having hot flashes while you’re sitting in the middle seat where you can’t move.  Talk about feeling a little bit claustrophobic!  Also, on this airline, I had my first exposure to Amharic – the language spoken in Ethiopia.  Bizarre language.  I was told they have several hundred “letters” in their alphabet.  In other words, they have a “letter” for every sound (unlike English where most letters make several sounds).  Written, it looks similar to Arabic.