Tuesday 8 January 2008

Ethiopian Christmas

The family I live with have been away to stay with their family for Christmas which means I've had to house to myself for the last few days which has been great. Although we get on well, having total privacy has been good. For a start I gave the toilet a good clean!

Yesterday (7th January 2008), it was Ethiopian Christmas day - a national holiday. Starting at around 1130 I was invited to someone's house for coffee. For the next six hours it became a bit like that Christmas episode of "The Vicar of Dibley." I visited three houses and had tebs (meat) and injura, bread, popcorn and coffee at all of them. Just when I thought I'd got away and was nearly at my door, there was a shout from across the street and I was invited to my fourth tebs and coffee etc. I finally got away at 1700. The trouble is, the whole time I'm waiting to find out which item contains the bacteria that'll keep me up all night!!!

Some of the houses had "Happy Christmas" signs up, one had lights on a few branches of a tree. It was funny visiting the other houses as they are structurally identical to my house but with different arrangements of furniture and one was turned 90 degrees and one 180 degrees relative to my house so the sun was in a different position.

In one house, the family had children and I showed them a number of games you can play with bottle tops, including snatch the top, table football, shove halfpenny and magic tricks.

At one point I was offered raw meat (kitfo) but with the risk of getting worms very high, I gave it a miss!

Next year I said I would get some mince pies shipped over so they can try them!

Astronomy

Because of the lack of street lights, the skies are really clear here. You can really see the Milky Way which is overhead as I am near the equator. Also at the moment, Mars is a very prominent orange near Orion in the evening, and this morning I saw Venus shining very brightly in the South East (a morning star indeed!).

Temperature and weather

The overnight "lows" are still around 10 degrees C. We've passed the shortest day so I don't think it'll ever go lower than that. Apparently the weather forecast is to gradually get hotter as the days get longer and the sun gets higher in the sky at midday (up to 40 degrees C!!!) with no rain, then the rainy season begins at the end of April / beginning of May time. Two years ago some of the houses flooded as the river overflowed!! (Luckily I am in the row of houses that are the highest and furthest from the river!!)

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