More about the trip...

Okay, the rest won't be so detailed!

On Tuesday Ephrim picked us up at 10am... after a very restless night for Nathan and I and Meron sleeping for 12 hours. We went shopping and bought some traditional clothes and scarves. It was at a big outdoor market with all sorts of identical looking shops selling clothes. We were the only tourists there, and we were instructed by the drivers to pay a man to keep people away from us. It was really odd, but helpful. People really swarmed to us. We also got two of our suitcases, which was also helpful! Wednesday we toured the city. We went to the top of Entoto, a mountain offering a beautiful view of the city. We passed lots and lots of women carrying huge loads of wood down from the mountain to the city to sell. It is incredibly hard work. We toured Menelik's palace and the oldest church in Ethiopia and got our last two suitcases. Thursday was Embassy day. We also toured the National museum and saw the Mercato. The museum was strange. There were some amazing things there: the bones of the oldest hominid (Lucy, or Dinkenesh in Ethiopia) incredible national treasures, thrones and clothing from several different kings, artifacts, etc. The museum looked more like a living room, though. Old carpet on the floors and fake wood paneling on the walls. Things looked dusty and not as well preserved as I expected. It was really fun to see Lucy, though, and some of the art and artifacts were absolutely beautiful.

The Mercato was really amazing. It was just stall after stall selling everything you can imagine. There were people absolutely everywhere. Ephrim wouldn't let us get out of the van, because he said it wasn't a safe part of the city for us.

I was really really nervous about the embassy, as many of you know! I was worried we'd done something wrong in our paperwork and they wouldn't let us have a visa for Meron. We sat in a little waiting room full of people for 3 hours before they called our name, all of us with kids with us. Merrie slept a lot of the time, because she wasn't feeling very well. None of us had diaper bags or anything for the kids, because the appointments usually only take an hour at most. It was pretty miserable. Eventually they called our names and we went to a little booth. We took and oath that we'd tell the truth and they asked a few random questions, and the lady just said, "Congratulations, you've been approved!" It was a serious relief. They dropped us off at our guest house with instructions to be ready to go at 5:30 am so we could go to Assela the next day.

Pictures of Entoto and Menelik's palace, the National Museum and Ephrim some seriously cute kids who followed us through the whole museum playing with Merrie.