Ahh Addis Ababa… Whether you love it or hate it, you pretty
much end up doing both in drastically manic phases from one minute to the
next. Addis, after all, is a city of
extreme dichotomy. One minute you are drinking a liter of delicious German beer
in a delightfully nostalgic German beer garden, and the next you are being a
accosted by a crazy naked man or dodging herds of cattle on what were supposed
to be the streets of Addis Ababa’s posh district (relatively speaking).
I believe I can speak for the moral majority of volunteers
when I say that upon arriving in Addis for the first time, your first thought
is something along the lines of “Wow, what a dump, yet somehow not as bad as I
had imagined.” Then you go to your
training site, which in our case was Butajira. Then you adjust your previous
impression and settle with “Ok, Butajira is a dump, and Addis ain’t all that
bad.” THEN you go to your site, and your impression is readjusted yet again to
“OK, my site is a dumb, Addis is beautiful, and Butajira ain’t all that bad.” However,
we feel generally quite smitten with our site, and despite the fact that
Butajira had more in terms of Western comforts, our site is actually a much
more pleasant place to live.
Still, once in a while, most people based in the Addis area
(this includes any site up to 4 hours away) feel that they just need a weekend
in Addis to get away and decompress for a while. After weeks of chronic water and power outages, you need a least one night to scrub layers of dead skin off of your arms and use the internet. The city actually does have
many of the staples befitting any modern city. It has chaotic but reliable public
transportation, a decent cheeseburger, a modern movie theater, and several
affordable options in terms of accommodation that have hot showers and possibly
even wifi! For volunteers with deeps pockets or those who simply just need this
regardless of the price, you can even go to the Sheraton Hotel which hosts a
Sunday brunch complete with cheese, sausages, bacon, and limitless champagne.
Addis has just about anything within reason. A taxi ride almost anywhere in the
city won’t cost you more than about $10 with the so-called “white-price.” There
are numerous restaurants serving all kinds of decent international cuisine such
as Indian, Thai, Chinese, German, American, French, Korean, and even some of
the best Mexican food I have ever had outside of Mexico. Then again, I am no Mexican food coinsure.
Perhaps the worst part about Addis is the arrival and the
departure, as we must go through the infamous Mercato bus station, which is
something on which to be elaborated in another post. Addis Ababa is the most
disgusting, wonderful, grotesque, shocking, awful, exciting, and extremely
frustrating place I have ever been. I love to hate it, and I hate to love it.
-Donovan
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