Around town pix

These 2 pictures are taken from our 3rd floor room at the guest home. The green structure on the leftmost hill in the top picture is an Ethiopian Orthodox church. You may also notice a lot of water tanks on raised structures. Due to the regular power outages, water pumps are not reliable, so most people had gravity fed water systems that didn't require pumps. A truck would come around and fill the tanks as needed. Apparently Addis generates much of it power hydroelectrically, and is therefore dependent on rainfall to keep water levels high. Most of their rainfall comes from late June through September, so the water levels were low when we were there, thus the power outages. Sorry lady readers, not much mush-n-gush in this paragraph, but there might be some guys who care about this sort of thing...


Pedestrians, animals, and cars all made use of the roads. One of our group reported having seen a man pull up in a little car, open the trunk, and proceed to remove a full grown live cow that had been "packed away" for the ride! What a hoot! I would love to have seen that.