A night in Adwa

On the way back to our hotel in Adwa, Dan is on the phone constantly. It seems that he's in the midst of an acquisition that might have hit a hiccup. As one might expect cell phone coverage keeps coming and going. Eventually, we come to a stop on a ridge where he can get good stable reception. He takes a seat on the side of the road with a beautiful rock outcropping behind him. The scenery is absolutely gorgeous. I sneak up next to Dan to get my picture taken surrepticously. He looks like he's doing a "more bars in more place ad." After about thirty minutes we get a call from Ketachoo wondering whether we're okay. We tell him we are, but he urges us to get moving because night is coming. We get moving again.

We've already passed through Adwa on our way to the villages and we've had our hotel pointed out to us as we passed by. It's unremarkable. Fortunately for us, Scott remembers that one side of the hotel is very noisy and makes for a rough night of sleep. The value of this information is diminished considerably by his inability to remember whether it is the front of the hotel or the back. We give Dan the first room, which is on the back side of the hotel. He assumes that this is an evil scheme to give him the noisy room. But actually it's a reasonably large room and we figured he might need it to do business. Scott takes the next room and I get the last one - the one with the distinctive smell of mildew. It's not to hard to figure out the cause since the carpet has a water stain emanating from the bathroom. Like every other hotel in Ehtiopia, the bathroom is elevated. Water flows down. The odd part is that the designers seem to be oblivious to this information. It seems to me that it would be easy enough to at least put a lip on the step down form the bathroom. This should keep most of the water in the bathroom where it will have a chance to drain.

We're having dinner downstairs and we find a spot near the TV. We order beers (St. George) and mineral water. I try to order a beef dish, but they don't have it. I'm getting the distinct impression that menus in Ethiopia are a list of the possible things they might have rather than an itemization of the food they do have. I opt for the fasting menu which is a combination of three dishes - lentils, pureed lentils and salad. Salad is probably not recommended, but I've been taking Immodium prophalactically. The food is good.

We get updated on the Russian invasion of Georgia. We'd seen a lengthy interview with the Georgian president on the BBC the day before. In that interview he'd said something equivalent to "you know there had to be a lot of Russian planes in the sky, because we actually managed to shoot down two planes." As tragic as the situation was, we couldn't help but laugh. It appears that a day later things we're going no better for the Georgians who had launched a cease fire - presumably because they were out of bullets. We then switch over to the olympics where we watch Russia play Egypt in team handball. While the game generally doesn't thrill me, there is joy to be had in rooting against Russia and I do so vigorously. With the score tied and very little time left the Egyptians make a stop. They move up the court, but seem to commit an infraction around mid-court turning the ball over. Unfortunately, Dubai sports doesn't explain this in English, so we're somewhat in the dark. A moment later we're completely in the dark as the power fails. It's a brief outage. Perhaps a few minutes, but it's enough for us to miss the climatic end of the game. We head up to bed.