Ethiopia Trip

Last week (from 5th till 11th March, 2009) I visited Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for attending to a customer issue on one of Cypress' memory Part. The following are some of my experiences during the trip.

Addis Ababa is the capital City and also the biggest and most well developed city of Ethiopia. It is also the headquarter for United Nation's operations in Africa and because of this it is one of the better cities to stay in.

The climate here was really nice. The city is situated very near to the equator (9 deg North). Even then it is not very hot because of its altitude (2500m). Right now, its summer season and the maximum temperature was ~27C. In the night it used to be quite cold. I think the temp must have dropped to 10 but it feels like 5 because of the wind. None of the houses or even my Hotel had any fan/ac. It is never required in this country!.. If you go out in the sun, you would feel very hot, but the moment you enter any shade, it will again be cool! Everybody has to wear goggles to protect their eyes from UV light.

There were a lot of Indians in the city. A lot of Indians who came here earlier are teachers/professors in local school/colleges. Because of this, the local people respect Indians a lot. A lot of them even knew Hindi and on seeing me, they would greet in Hindi saying "Namaste", "Kaise ho?" etc.. (They could easily identify that I was from India). According to one Indian friend living here since last 2 years, there are around 3000 Indians in the city and they come together to celebrate festivals like holi etc. Also, lot of them are Gujarati and there is also a Gujarati people's association!! :)

There were also a lot of Indian restaurants - I saw 4 and went to 2 of them for lunch and dinner. For food, generally it is difficult to find vegetarian food here in Ethiopia. But these days. their fasting (Upvaas) period was going on. During fasting they don't eat Non veg or even milk products. So, if we order fasting food in any restaurant we can be assured of getting pure veg food :). And it was quite good. Here is a photo of their fasting food which i had for lunch one day. The round dosa like thing (it is folded in the photo) is called Injera and it is really big (almost 2.5 -3 times the normal dosa that we get in India) and it is also much thicker. Nearly 3/4th of it along with vegetables is more than enough for one person like me.

Most of the local people in Ethiopia are Christians. But the Christianity they follow here is different than what is followed in the US or UK or anywhere else. They have their own calendar which is about 7 years behind the normal calendar. They just celebrated the "Ethiopian Millennium" last year and i could see a lot of hoardings related to that everywhere. They have their own dates for Christmas, new year and other Christian festivals! There are a lot of sites in the country which are of religious importance to Christians. It is believed that Mother Mary stayed here for some time when she was traveling. One Indian friend told me that the songs they sing in Churches over here are different from other places and they sound somewhat like morning bhajans in our temples!!

Ethiopia is one of the most well developed countries in Africa. Their currency (Ethiopian Birr) is stronger than Indian Rupee (1 Birr = ~5 INR). So in general things are a little bit costlier than India. In the capital city, the roads are all very good and broad. Two wheelers are banned in the city! There are a lot of large Vans (slightly bigger than our Maruti Omni) which run across the city on a sharing basis (something like 6 seaters in some cities of India) and can take you from one place to another in 2-5 Birr. I saw very few municipality buses on the road. I used taxi to travel most of the times (since it was billed to my company :) ) and it was quite costly (about 10 Bir per km). The city in general was much less polluted than any normal Indian city. The concept of Credit/Debit card is still not famous here and you have to carry cash wherever you go. 

Also, all the development is still only limited to the 4-5 big cities in the country. Outside the cities, you will not find any mobile network or even landline. And at lot of places no electricity also!. The internet is pretty slow and 128 KBPS broadband is supposed to be fast!. (I saw such an advertisement in one of the cyber cafes!! )

All in all, it was a nice place and i had quite a good experience. Much better than I expected when leaving from India. 

Hope I haven't not bored you all with a very long blog post. You can find some photos from the trip here.