Practical Tasks

We have a lot of practical things on the agenda today. - We need to head down to the Danish embassy to get the police report translated into Danish or English. - We need to pick up more malaria pills since we’re planning to visit the tribes in the southern part of the country. - We have to pay for our flight ticket south, as it’s only reserved for now. We’re flying on Wednesday and coming back to Addis the following Wednesday. - We need to buy a charger for the little digital camera we have left. We’re down to just one battery and one memory card since the rest got stolen. - We need to do laundry because everything is dusty and dirty. - We need to buy shampoo in Addis since things like that are ridiculously expensive in other cities. In Gondor, we had to pay 180 birr for sunscreen. - We can’t stand living so sparsely as we have been, so we need to book a nicer hotel room for the last days of our trip when we return from the tribes in the south. It’s tough not being able to sleep well because of bedbugs and not being able to sit down on a toilet. We were sent from one authority to another while trying to get the police report translated and approved. First, we went to the Danish embassy. They couldn’t help with the translation but told us to go to a translation agency, and then we’d need to head to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to verify the translation. Finding a translation agency was easy. When we got to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they were closed for lunch. We took that time to grab lunch ourselves at a nice little local hotel that served fasting, which is vegetarian food. Only 40 birr per person. Back at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we had to wait in line for a while before being told they couldn’t verify the document. It wasn’t their job. Hmm, we were a bit tired of hearing that. But we didn’t want to spend any more of our vacation time on this. We’re crossing our fingers and hoping our insurance company will accept the translation of the police report. There’s nothing more we can do. We also made it to Ethiopian Airlines to pay for our ticket south. We’re traveling on Wednesday. The best news of the day was that we managed to find a charger for our digital camera, so we won’t run out of battery. We’ve met a German couple at our hotel who were involved in a bus accident. They’re both wearing neck braces and are in a lot of pain in their backs, just waiting to get home to Germany. The doctor has said they need to fly home in first class so they can lie down. So far, they’ve been waiting since Friday, and they still don’t know when they’ll get home. It’s a battle between their embassy and their insurance company. There are many bus accidents down here. Often, half the people die in an accident—either from the crash itself or from the aftermath since access to hospitals is limited. Most accidents happen between cities where there are no hospitals. You just have to hope there’s a son in the nearby village studying medicine.