Ethiopia Trip #1: Day 2

After a really great night's sleep on Friday night, we awoke to nice showers and french toast for breakfast. 

Our good friend, Bonnie, was in Ethiopia with her kids, waiting until she could bring them home, so we went to visit her at her guest house.  We hung out with her for a little while, and then walked a few blocks to a restaurant for lunch.  Unfortunately, we didn't have our camera with us, so I have NO PICTURES of our time together :-( 

After lunch we walked a few more blocks to a roadside stand to do some souvenir shopping.  Bonnie's husband had posted a box of Obama pens on Facebook a couple of weeks earlier and we thought it would be fun to get some for our family.  This is the picture I'd seen on Facebook:

This looks like a store, right??  Bonnie told us she thought she remembered where they were sold, so we followed her.  We crossed the street (oh yes, we walked across an Addis street!!) to what looked like just a sidewalk with some corrugated metal on the side of it - sort of like you might see around here when there are buildings under construction.  Then I noticed that Bonnie was actually peering into openings in the metal.  When I looked closer, I realized that they were tiny little roadside stands.  And I mean tiny.  Like there was a shelf on one wall - maybe two, and barely enough room for a man to stand in there.  When Bonnie finally located the correct stand, it sold pens and gum.  That's all.  There were a few different kinds of pens to choose from, but of course we were looking for the Obama pens.  The man running the stand was SO nice.  For all of the pens we bought - between us and Bonnie, it was about a dozen - he took each one and tested it out to make sure it worked before he sold it to us.  Then, he grabbed a rubber band to put around the bundle, but asked Rob if he could do it, pointing out the fact that he only had one arm.  That little side trip was about the biggest adventure of our time in Addis, but we have such fond memories of it :-)

Later that afternoon we went back to BJoe and then out to dinner that night with the other family who was there for court.