We arrived in Addis-Ababa in the early morning. After putting many efforts into falling asleep, we had finally let it go. Every hour we got woke up by one person of the plane crew! We had indeed several meals, our entire trip long. But who expect to eat fruits’ salad at 2am in cloud nine? Anyway, Charles and I managed to sleep for a few minutes between each interruption.
As shown in the pictures below, you can observe the result after our 7 hours journey! We went directly to Addis-Ababa’s Bole airport from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport.
Right after we landed and we got off the plane, we saw in the horizon the mountains surrounding Addis-Ababa. In the bus which was going to drive us to the airport, I was about to take pictures of the planes and the landscape, but a guy, who presented himself has a former employee for the security services of the airport, advised me not to do so. I did anyway, but I took the decision to be more careful then, as the police services and the army are said to be quite touchy about shooting pictures of their facilities.
In the airport, we queued a little time to show our brand new business visas. Then we met a guy waiting for us to welcome us. Once we had our luggage and a little change from the commercial bank of Ethiopia, we left the airport and were driven by a special African Union car to the hotel they had booked for us. Its name was… wait for it... “Hôtel de France”! Perhaps they didn’t want us to feel homesick, but that was it: we had pictures of Parisian sightseeing on the walls of the entrance hall, and we finally learnt that the owner was French. This latter fact is important, because we also found out that this hostel was a bit more expensive than what we expected. As we are just hired as interns in the Communication department of the African Union (AU), we do not receive any accommodation in any form. Yet, the AU employees who took care of our welcome booked 2 rooms costing 55 USD a night…
Sure, it had all the occidental comfort attributes, but come on! We are just students, living on the scholarship generously given by the State! So we had a conversation with the French manager of the hostel, which understood well our situation, and promised to look for another place to sleep in for us.
Anyway, the place was localized very close to a church, where a priest was shouting all morning long, in a language we couldn’t understand. I guess it was some Amharic, one of Ethiopia’s specific languages. Anyhow, we managed to sleep 7 hours to get some rest after our five-thousands-journey, and then we decided that it was time to discover the city.
One of the hostel’s employees advised us to call for a cab, as downtown Addis was a few kilometers far from here. A guy he knew came to pick us up, and we were driven in the whole city, through the main places.
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