Overnight in Adigrat

Our hotel in Adigrat has a something I haven’t seen in our previous hotels – tourists. There appears to be a group of about a dozen staying in the hotel. At least some of whom speak French. We check into our rooms. This one appears to be standard fare until I enter the bathroom. As I open the door it slams into something. That something it turns out is the sink. The door is at about 45°. I slide into the bathroom sideways , stepping into the shower stall because there is nowhere else to step. I then close the door to behold the toilet nestled into a small alcove facing the sink. More accurately, abutting the sink. I slide horizontally past the sink and take a seat. I can to rest my chin on the sink while seated. In fact, it’s so close that it seems a shame not to, so I do. I then go to wash my hands. As I bend over, I am reminded that the door is too close to allow that. As I slide back into the shower stall so I can open the door, I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t design the door to swing out. It would have solved a lot of problems.

I go looking for my companions so we can head to dinner. I finally find Scott up on the roof. The top floor of the hotel has glass doors leading out onto the roof. The glass part of the doors is shattered on the floor. I step through the opening. Scott’s got a good satellite signal and since we’re winding down our trip he decides to splurge on some bandwidth to see the trailer for the Born in September campaign. He starts the trailer and then flips back and forth to assess the load progress of the trailer and then to check how close he is to his bandwidth limit. It becomes very clear, that he will reach his limit well before the video loads, but he keeps hoping. When he gets to within a Gig, he stops the trailer and concedes. I head over to dinner while Scott wraps up his email.

Dinner is in a restaurant out the back of the hotel. It is run by the same people who ran our first restaurant in Mekele and it has roughly the same setup including the butcher’s window. The food is again good, but unremarkable. After dinner it’s back to my room to read and sleep. Once, again, however, we are situated across the street from a nightclub that, generously, shares the music from inside through a speaker in front. I don’t know when the music stops, but its off when I get up the next morning around 5:30. We walk down the street and around the corner to a small café. I have a spreis and three eggs (“ka-choek”). We get into the SUV’s and we’re off to look at some irrigation projects. charity:water doesn’t do irrigation projects, but it’s of interest nonetheless.