It looks a bit different

Day 28 - Addis Ababa

This is our second time in Addis and we can't really remember exactly how Addis looked on our earlier trip but it did seem there was a lot more modern and high rise buildings. The area around our hotel was a mixture of new buildings and ramshackle housing. 

It was a nice sunny day and the temperature of around 19C was a welcome change to the heat and humidity in West Africa. It was Sunday so things were very quiet, we took a taxi to the octagonal St. George's Church and listened to a large group singing outside with some nice drumming that reminded us of West Africa. There were many people worshipping outside with their heads pressed to the bricks.

After an afternoon wandering around the area we went to a Yemeni restaurant close to our hotel for a very tasty dinner.

Day 27  - Addis Ababa

Our room overlooks the street and some local bars, the first night the loud music was a bit of a nuisance but was turned off about 3am. For some reason though Sunday night was a shocker, there were drunk people screaming, yelling and banging until they finally turned the music off at 7am. Hotel management were very quick to move us to the other side of the hotel the next morning.

At lunch time we caught a taxi to the Mercado market, the largest market in Africa. It was a very busy market and we were the only non-locals walking around, we were approached a few times by men who wanted to tell us where the spice market and jewellery sections were, one man in particular wouldn't leave us alone until we told him off for following us.

After wandering around for an hour we looked for a taxi to take us back. We found a taxi rank but they were all trying to charge us five times the going rate for cars that were so old it was surprisingly they even ran. Luckily a modern new taxi pulled up so we jumped in and he used an app on his phone as the taximeter and we had a more reasonably priced trip back to the hotel.

We noticed that we were getting tired more quickly than normal after walking or climbing stairs, we worked out that this was the altitude (around 2300m affecting us slightly).