First day in Ethiopia- Nov 13th 2005
After spending a wonderful week in Kenya visiting our friends, Kip and Katy Lines, we finally arrived in Ethiopia. We arrived around 9 PM local times... thats 1 PM eastern standard... but no jet lag for us thanks to that week in Kenya. If possible I highly recommend having a chance to over come the jet lag before you aquire your child. I know it really helped us feel much more prepared.
The Ethiopian airport was so much nicer then it was when I visited in 1997. I remmember this "police-state" type airport where the walls were cinderblock and without windows and a feeling of escaping a prison just to leave the building. Now we walked through beautiful pale blue marble halls with large glass windows looking out on the runway and the city. We entered large open rooms of the same marble and walked to neat little cubicals with organized lines to inquire about our entry visas.
We had debated in the US whether or not to apply for a visa before we left but decided to wait until we arrived as we were assured that getting one on arrive would be no problem. Also for us the cost was a factor. In the US we would have paid $70 per person plus the cost of Fed-exing both ways, at the Ethiopian airport we paid $20 each. The whole process took about 5 mins and the officials where organized and very friendly to us.
After aquiring the visa, we walked quickly through immigration, collected our luggage, and breezed through customs. No problems at all anywhere.
We were met right on the other side of customs by our agencies in country driver, Tessfaye. We also met two other families who had arrived just ahead of us from the US. They where both there to pick up thier infant daughters just as we were. Tessfaye got all our luggage stuffed into the back of the 15 passanger van and off we went.
We had decided to stay an Ethiopian run hotel called the Ghion. It has an internet site and is billed as a nice hotel for internationals. We had made reservations through our travel agenct, but he had never dealt with them before so was not sure what to expect. We had long debated where to stay as we have a number of friends and connections in Ethiopia plus our agency has rooms at the Care Center for families to stay. Unfortunately none of our friends or connections were able to help us out this week as one thing or another came up. That left the Ghion or the Care Center. We where told that there where no refrigerators at the Care Center and since I had nine bags of pumped breastmilk to keep frozen we needed a refrigerator... so off to the Ghion we went.
I wish I could say that the Ghion was as beautiful as its pictures or that it was even half as nice as discribed by some others.... but I definately can not. The trouble started at the front desk when there was no record of our reservation. They did have one suite left and we could have it for $80 a night. Thats a bit steep in my mind but if it was nice $80 was okay. When we got to the room it was anything but nice... $30 a night would have been too much! I'll let Brian vent in detail about all that was wrong (the worst of which was the fact that one of the doors into the suite did not lock), but I will say that the only good thing was that the dirty refrigerator did work.
And so our first day in Ethiopia ended... we planned to call the Care Center in the morning and see if there was anyway to stay there the rest of the week.
