We loved Uganda (it ranks among our favorite countries visited on this trip), but we were looking forward to Ethiopia. We weren’t just excited about the food or the famous sites (although we were excited about both!), but because Ethiopia would be so different from the countries we had visited in Southern and East Africa. Just for starters, Ethiopia’s national language, Amharic, is not written in Roman characters, and Ethiopia uses the Julian calendar (rather than the Gregorian calendar) and therefore is seven years behind the rest of the world.1
We were also looking forward to taking a breather in Addis Ababa. Our plans for the Ethiopian capital included picking up Egyptian and Sudanese visas,2 and so we anticipated having some time to kill. After thirteen days of near-constant travel in Uganda, that didn’t seem like such a bad thing. We didn’t realize how much time we would need to kill, but that’s another story . . .
