Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Subject: TTT - The Trumble Travels - May 2007 Ethiopia I
I arrived in Ethiopia on Saturday night, May 12. I had a much better trip into Ethiopia than I did last time (in March when I flew from Rwanda to Ethiopia I got quite sick on the plane…I took a picture of one of the vomit bags I used…If you’d like to see it, just let me know). Anyway, on Sunday morning Habtu and Bamrot took me to church at the International Evangelical Church. The service was conducted in English and the pastor is an American. After church we went to a pizza place. The pizza was good but not particularly exotic (no eggs on it or anything like that).
From the restaurant we walked to the National Museum but on the way I negotiated some with a vendor over some watches and sunglasses. We were unable to reach an agreement on price. Some of the watches for sale by this vendor had images of Osama Bin Laden on them…others had the image of one famous soccer player or another. Most were just normal watches without the image of anyone on them (the watches I was negotiating over were “normal” watches). When I was in high school I kind of adapted a watch so that it had an image of RoboCop on it. Remember RoboCop? (“Murphy, it’s you.” “Where is Clarence Boddicker?” --the guy who played Clarence Boddicker was the same actor who later played the Dad on That Seventies Show). But, we digress.
At the National Museum there are several Ethiopian things including “Lucy”, the famous skeleton of what some people believe to be a 3.2 million year old human ancestor (I don’t believe it). Anyway, we saw Lucy. There was also some thrones of past Ethiopian emperors including Haile Selassie I who was Ethiopia’s last emperor before the Communists took over in the early 1970s. Selassie was emperor for more than 40 years. Selassie is believed by Rastafarians to be the Messiah and part of the Trinity. There was other stuff at the museum too but most of it is not pictured here.
Those are some really cool, pizza knives, though.
Avocado, Passion, Mango, and Pineapple Juice…not too bad.
Some Coptic folks
The National Museum
“Foreingners” cost 5 times as much as Ethiopians to visit the museum but 10 Birr is still less than $1.25. Everybody makes mistakes…
Lucy – the complete skeleton on the far right shows the parts of Lucy that had to be reconstructed. The dark parts show the parts that were found.
Haile Sellasie I’s throne
Crowns
Communist Art
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