Hotel Hilton

For those who find themselves in the capital of Ethiopia for more than a couple of weeks, there seems to be one stop that everybody makes. The Hilton Hotel. The home of stellar fruit juices, extortionate internet connections and the Tex-Mex wrapper. We often find ourselves there a couple times a week for a quick sanity top up. This peculiar, but entertaining compound is a world apart from the life outside its Kalashnikov-guarded gates.

We decided to go there because we felt that, since we were going to be living here for 2 months, it would be good to get some exercise. Little did we know that it would not only become a morning gym stop, but also our connection to shoe-shine boys, taxi drivers, UN translators, happy bartenders, Leonard Cohen look-alikes, Whitney Houston wannabes and just yesterday, a Senegalese diplomat who has spent the last 3 years in Ottawa and whose brother is the ambassador to Canada.

If there’s one day to go to the Hilton, it’s Sunday. For a 150 Birr ($20 CAN) you get a 3-hour all-you-can-eat buffet brunch, including endless re-fills of the bubbly. Bamboo shades cover the tables, while an Ethiopian Leonard Cohen sings a throaty “Stand By Me” and a Whitney Housten belts an, albeit painful, rendition of “I Will Always Love You”. It was here that we met Jaffer, a Sudanese UN translator, who has personally worked with Koffi Anan. Jaffer loves Joan Baez – he played on her guitar at some concert in Paris in the 70’s – he has two kids, he’s quite the whisky connoisseur and he insists we visit him at his Egyptian timeshare on the Red Sea coast the next time we come to Africa.

When we leave the Hilton, we’re always rushed by the same group of boys, carrying home-made wooden shoe-shine boxes. They walk with us, jostling for best pitch position, until we reach the taxi man, who insists on negotiating with us no matter how many times we use him. “Today, you pay 20 Birr, ok?” he says with a smile. “No, today we pay the same as we paid last time, 15 Birr, ok!” we respond, smiling back.

On the days we walk home, we head down the hill towards Meskal Square. An eight-lane intersection and probably the largest I’ve ever seen. On the way, we pass the barred gates of the African Union with the same three women begging for change on the street outside. They hold their children, whose heads are shaved to protect them from lice except for a little tuft of hair on top so that “God has something to use, should he have the need to call them.”

Further along, we walk over a bridge with a brown pungent river struggling to run beneath it. Make-shift shacks rest along its muddy shore and their residents use the river to wash clothes and themselves. There are often twenty or so sheep grazing on the far side on the only patch of grass available.

At the corner of Meskal Square, we pass the Estefanos Ethiopian Orthodox church. We’ve never gone in, but its steps are full of women who, as soon as they see us, send out their young children to beg for change. Add to this the polio victims with twisted or missing limbs struggling to survive and… the corner is a heartbreak.

From there, we run across Meskal Square, dodging the herd of blue and white VW mini vans. There are various ways to transport yourself around Addis Ababa, one of which are these mini buses that are all privately owned. They all go in different directions indicated by the woyala yelling “Bole, Bole” or “Mexco, Mexco” out the side window. You never know how much it costs to any particular destination, so you just give them 2 Birr and hold out your hand expecting change, pretending you know exactly what you’re doing.

Once we’ve crossed Meskal Square we begin the 10-minute walk up Bole Road, towards Olympia. We pass a couple of internet cafés, plenty of beauty salons and half-built high-rises with long wooden poles used for scaffolding gingerly clinging to their sides. Further up, we pass the Shell gas station and then at the lights make a sharp left onto “Olympia” or Dominican Republic of Congo Street, depending on who you talk to.

Walking down now, we pass the “Queen Burger” restaurant, popular with the upper-middle class crowd who come here with their massive shiny SUV’s. We don’t go here anymore because every time we’ve been we’ve had stomach issues. On the left is the video store where we get the most recent, “surely legal”, DVD’s for 5 Birr, and finally, we walk straight ahead and our home away from home comes into view, the Wanza.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under He Said. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.