It's been awhile since we've updated the blog, partly because ehtiopian internet doesn't like blogspot. We've now remembered that we can email blogs in... but we can't edit the times and dates, so these will be appearing out of order, my apologies. Hopefully we can fix it up in Tanzania.
We have now been in Africa for 2 months and I suppose it's only fair that one of us got food poisoning in that length of time, but it doesn't feel fair at all. We have been eating a lot more local food in Ethiopia and due to not being able to either speak or read Amharic a lot of time we convey 'no fish' and leave the rest up to chance. In this way we ate a quite nice local dinner our first night in Gondar, it was injera (big sour pancake thing that all food is served on and eaten with) with some meat thing (don't ask what type of meat I don't know). It was very tasty and enjoyable but I spent the next two days with liquid gushing out of both ends, which we've named the Gondor gut (this beat out Ethiopian evacuation as the name).
So despite this being our fourth day in Gondor it is the first day that we have really explored. This is a really lovely town, built around the old crumpling walls of 17th century palaces and churches which are still in use from the same era. In the 250 years that Gondar was the capital of Ethiopia there were 7 castles built within an area the size of a couple of city blocks. It was a very different experience to see these castles in the middle of Africa, as goats graze within the compound walls, people mow the lawns with sickles, and the streets around the outside teem with people, taxis, minibuses, donkeys and horse drawn carts. Not to mention the touts (everyone one of whom has two people wanting to go to the simien mountains tomorrow!).
The other very noteworthy thing about Ethiopia is that it is the birthplace of coffee, and so the cafe culture is king. There are hundreds of little cafes serving excellent coffee and cakes and nothing else (this has led to some slight embarrassment as tables have been vacated for us in what we assumed was a packed restaurant at dinner time, to discover they don't serve food). It has however been fun eating cake again!!
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