We love ethiopia

We all agree that the north of ethiopia (means Gondar, Simien mountains, blue nile falls and Lalibela) is probably the most beautiful landscape we have ever seen in our lives! just as half of ethiopia these historical villiages are lying in around 2000m above sea level in the rift valley, a landscape formed by colded lava a few million years ago. now after the rain season everything is put in different tones of green as far as you can see...In Bahir Dar we saw 3 of the nearly 20 monasteries at lake tana. they are around 600 years old and mostly totally and colourfully painted with historical and bible paintings, for us the most beautiful churches we have ever seen! and the famous nile, the biggest river of africa has its spring here.

At the evening we decided to taste the traditional (by ethiopians every day eaten) injera, a huge pancake, taste like german mischbrot (LP: look like old kitchen flannel), with different mostly hot spicy meat or beans in the middle and then you pic peaces of injera and wrap it around the meat and eat it. it is quite tasty, but once a week is really enough...in the northern ethiopia they drink traditionally a quite tasty honey beer called tej.

The most interesting and funny as well is the traditional dance, called iskista, where they shake their shoulders very quick in all different ways, and a guy plays a traditional instrument and making kind of singing improvised stand up comedian(especially with ferenjis) and everybody is laughing(too bad that we don't speak amharic). then they ask you for a dance and you have to show who is better, if you are not sporty it is really strenous!

Another weird things is that a lot of men are holding hands, especially the youth...it is a sign of friendship...and they have a long nail on the small finger, sometimes painted, as fashion!

Gondar has a lot of old castles from the Selassie-dynasty. there from the 17th to the 18th century each of the 6 kings has built his own castle next to each other, including sauna, lions cage, and even a bathing castle...

We stayed in an old italian hotel, which was like a lot other houses built in (as i think very picturesc) old-italian-fascist-art-deco-stile. well it was really! old and humid and some thing were not working anymore, and at least we got fleas, who stayed by our side until we moved back to Addis.(well i am still scratching)

Lalibela was probably the most beautiful of these 3 towns. it is still a pilgrim place because of the 11 rockchurches in town and another 10 around the area, built by King Lalibela in the 13th century as a second jerusalem. it is amazing, they just reduced material from the rock to build it. one even was built in a huge open cave where a waterfall was coming down and 5000 skellets of egypt pilgrims were lying!

We met a nice boy (one of the few who didn't only want money) who invited us to his place to make traditional coffe-ceremony, where of course the women of the house (truly the women here are the real workers: we saw them carrying stones on construction-places, and even young and old carrying kilos of fire wood and food, and the men say it belongs to housework!) roasting coffee-beans on a stove, then crushing them and brewing fresh coffee 3 times with the same powder and serving it with popcorn. it's so tasty! as well we had to share a injera and the inviter has to feed the guest, too bad the beans where really hot and it was quite hard for us to take the bite and say friendly how good it tastes!

so far until here, there are new pictures in the ethiopian flag, and i add a masai picture and a picture of the interesting emirates-stewardess in the kenian flag...

greetings from all of us!

"amesgnalhu" means thank you!