This is the official slogan of the Ethiopian tourism board. Aside from the chaotic and somewhat anarchic streets of Addis Ababa, the climate of the capital is quite good. Addis is set at about 2,000m, making it a cool and sunny place where reggae, Nigerian high life, and Amharic riffs float through the streets until the wee hours in the morning.
Unfortunately, it appears as if the government has blocked Blogspot, so I'm going to forward my posts and have them posted by Annalisa.
The Chinese people here mostly work through state-run corporations, such as the China Road and Bridge Corporation which, you guessed it, builds roads and bridges. They've also opened vocational schools to train engineers, electricians, mechanics, and other kinds of technicians. Just ran into two guys working for a bottling company, who are soon off to Rwanda. They had just come back from Djibouti and Somalia. The technician's hand was broken by an angry official at the Djibouti airport when the technician refused to give a bribe. Apparently the bottling industry is big in Somalia -- they were paid $800,000 USD to build a factory. I asked, "isn't... Somalia... dangerous?" "SO DANGEROUS! There were UN tanks and soldiers everywhere, and guys with rocket launchers and machine guns." I think I'll leave Somalia off my Watson fellowship, thanks.
Ethiopia is a really beautiful country, and I haven't even gotten to the "beautiful parts." It's a relatively safe country compared to its neighbors (Somalia and Sudan come to mind), but unfortunately has seen its fair share of political violence and famines in the recent past.
Barack Obama is a hit here. Today I saw a cafe called "Obama coffee cafe" with images of Obama on its sign. The monitor backgrounds to the internet cafe's computers are all images of Barack Obama. One Ethiopian employee at the China Road and Bridge Corporation offered to show me around, on the condition that I voted for Obama.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment