Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday we visited Mount Entoto which looks out over Addis. Emperor Menelik II, claimed to be a direct descendant from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, built his palace there and founded Addis Ababa. It is considered a sacred location with several simple and rusty tin-roofed monasteries surrounding the church and palace. The church was not accessible to us. The palace consists of three simple structures where king Menelik II and his wife Taitu slept, ate and received guests, each category of guests required to enter and leave through a separate entrance. Compared to the quarters of their royal and imperial contemporaries in Europe, the buildings were striking in their simplicity. They also contrasted with the heavy embroidered and bejewelled gowns worn by the imperials and clergy which we saw earlier in the adjacent museum.

A nearby church, named after archangel Raguel, was open. Like the other structures it was simple on the outside but awesome on the inside. Around the central room, only accessible to men, so not us, the biblical stories were painted in the typical bright-colored Ethiopian style. I recognized most of the imagery although there were some stories (like St. George slaying the dragon) that did not come out of the bible that Tae and I know.

I learned that the bad people are portrayed with one eye only while the good people are shown with both eyes. In most of the pictures the one-eyed people do terrible thing to the two-eyed people; a true horror show with severed heads, limbs, drownings, quartering and finally, the devil himself in dark and menacing colors.

Outside the church Karen noticed a monkey but our guide, for reason we could not figure out, told her it was a rabbit, even though it was so not a rabbit and we were all totally sober. Maybe the guide was not.

In the car on the way back we discovered we had biting ants in our pants. It took awhile to squash them all; they were big. By the time we stopped for a lilttle shopping expedition the ants were all dead and the sting of their bites gone. There were hundreds of little shops selling endless variations of woven fabrics, from simple unbleached cotton dresses and shirts to colorful shimmering shawls and a few tourist trinkets that play on the Rastafarian theme. I bought a few shawls that look best when they are displayed together.