Ethiopia January 2019 Trip Report Part 2

After a nice night with Fiora (I will spare you the details) I went in the hotel to the breakfast buffet. F did not want to join me for breakfast which was a bit of a bummer for me. Still dressed in her beautiful traditional outfit she would not have looked like a hooker so I would not have been ashamed to have her joining me for breakfast. There is a big difference in character between the average Indo or Thai girl compared to Ethiopian girls. Ethio girls are never scared to speak their mind, and they will always tell you want they want. The “up to you” phrase that Thai and Indo girls often use when you suggest something (they will often just do what the guy tells them to do even though they may not like it) is not really common with Ethio girls. If they don’t want to do something they will not do it. So she went home, or wherever she went around 9:30 AM while I had my breakfast. The buffet is a mix of local dishes and western dishes so I did not need to eat the dreaded Injera.

After breakfast I had a rest till around midday when S would show up again for the next roll around town. The plan was to first visit Mercato (walking distance from my hotel), the biggest open air market in all of Africa.

Mercato is not only the biggest open air market in Africa where you can find goods and products from all over Ethiopia and beyond, but it is also home to the most cunning and dangerous pickpocketers in AA, so S told me to be very careful for my wallet and especially my handphone. Handphones are even more desired by the pickpockets then wallets. Mercato is huge, it is so big actually that if you wander around the market on your own you could easily get lost in the mazes of stalls and shops lining an area of over 250 hectares. It’s chaotic, colorful, bustling and very smelly. A problem is also the many buses and cars and motorbikes that drive through the small lanes, you must constantly be on the lookout otherwise they just might drive you over since Ethiopian drivers are notorious for not looking out for any pedestrians. They simply don’t care.

Then there are the hordes of goats that suddenly appear from nowhere and before you know it you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a goat herd. Also there are lots of guys walking around the  market with huge loads on their heads sometimes hanging 2 metres between their shoulders and these guys also don’t look where they are going so it happens frequently that a load bumps into your head.

Mercato is a must visit but it is actually hard to find something if you are on your own, it’s so chaotic and unorganized and there are so many things to find that it will become confusing where to look for what to say the least. It is a great place for souvenir shopping (probably the greatest in Africa). I saw quite a few tourists there actually.

After Mercato we needed a rest and went to a coffee place just outside the market where we could see more of the bustle. the activities going on in the market are really interesting to observe, almost documentary-worthy in my opinion.

AA is a nice place for walking although the streets are very chaotic and hard to traverse due to the potholes, tiles lying around everywhere, holes in the ground etcetera, but the weather is always pleasant in January. Bright sunny days every day, all day and not warmer then around 22 degrees during the day, a great climate for walking and much more pleasant compared to the humidity and stifling heat of Bangkok.

Around 5 PM we went for dinner to a restaurant in the piazza. In the piazza are many restaurants that don’t just serve the traditional Ethiopian food so we got a nice chicken steak with rice and vegetables.

Then back to the hotel to refresh and to get ready for another night in the bars in the Piazza. The nightlife in the Piazza starts very early, and as soon as the sun sets (around 7:30 PM) the bars  start filling up with punters and girls. This night we went to Abyssinia Cafe. This is the only bar in the Piazza that does not employ working girls, but to make good on that they do have quite a few sexy waitresses there. One of those waitresses whom S already knew of course and who would very much be my type was our target for tonight. This bar is full almost every night and this night was no exception. We entered the place around 7:30 and there was no place to sit. Around 90% of the clients are guys and around 10% girls. Regular girls who go out to drink and dance and hook up if they like somebody. Some are freelancers but S told me most of them are just normal girls.

We met the waitress, she was indeed my type but she acted very cold and uninterested towards me. This is the style of most Ethio girls when they meet a guy for the first time. They first want to know you more and if you are nice enough and if you treat them nice, after that they will usually loosen up and become friendlier. I did not really enjoy being in Abyssinia, it was too crowded for my liking and the girl did not have much time to chat with us. She was there for a minute and then she was gone again constantly because she had to work and was very busy. After a few beers we decided to move to one of the hostess bars in the Piazza. Here it was quieter but there were no pretty working girls to be found. We still decided to have a few beers there and sat down. We ordered a beer with one of the waitresses who was actually quite cute and slender and she even spoke some English. This girl had more time and sat down with us, for a beer. Even though she was not a working girl per se she was allowed to do so. The girl (kdist) asked me if I wanted to add her number to an application called IMO. I had never heard of it but decided to download it from Google play. Not many Ethio girls seem to use WhatsApp which is a surprise for me but whatever, it seems one can also use IMO as a chat application. I added her and we talked some more and had more beers. After that we headed out to another bar for some more beers and then S brought me back to my hotel.

The next day was the start of the Timkat festival in AA which lasts for 2 days. The Timkat festival is an Ethiopian Orthodox celebration where a replica of the arc of the covenant is carried from church to church in the city. The main church was conveniently located just a 5 minutes walk from my hotel. S and I went to the church around 10 PM where the preparations of the celebrations were already in full swing. Huge crowds of locals in traditional costume (white dresses with beautiful decorations) were already gathered to wait for the spectacle to start. It starts when the priests dressed in beautiful ornate orthodox robes and their beautiful headwear carry the arc out of the church. Surrounded by Levites with bells and gongs which give a very beautiful sound. The mass of people line up behind them and then they start walking. The women are making the famous tong clicking sounding like lalalalala that you can hear women do in many African countries. Groups of young guys with large sticks walk behind them chanting and the other people are cheering. The whole group of people, maybe around 10,000 or so then marches to the next church. I did make some videos with my mobile of the whole scene but did unfortunately not make any pictures, otherwise I would have uploaded some with this.

After we had watched the start of the festival we went to the Arat Kilo area for a fish lunch. Most of the fish served in Ethiopia is fried Talapia, it is by far the most eaten fish and when you order fish in Ethiopia you will get served Talapia 9 out of 10 times. In some places one can also eat Nile Perch which is in my opinion much more delicious than Talapia but alas, also a lot more expensive.

When you go to Ethiopia you will soon discover that there are no big international food chains to be found anywhere in the country. For lovers of McDonald’s, KFC, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut, Starbucks this will be bad news because you will find none of them. They do have the Ethiopian style McD’s and Starbucks though. The McD’s equivalent of McDonald’s for instance is the local burger chain called WOW burgers. I ate there once and the burgers there are in my opinion totally inedible. They taste horrible and I think fake meat is used, and the French fries are also horribly tasting, so that was once and never again. The coffee on the other hand is good. Ethiopia is said to be the birth place of coffee (the Kaffa region where coffee got its name from would have been the place where coffee originated from). You find a lot of so-called traditional coffee places in Ethiopia often just on a street. Girls in traditional dress usually exploit such places. Coffee there is made in ceremonial way and served black in very tiny cups. This coffee is usually very strong and tastes almost totally different from the coffee most people are used to. Some of the traditional coffee girls selling this kind of coffee are absolutely gorgeous so it may sometimes be a good idea to walk around checking out these traditional coffee places to look for one with a beautiful coffee lady. You may be able to take them out after work. My brother told me he did this a few times and even managed to get one between the sheets.

Observations about Ethiopian girls

Ethiopian girls come in different looks. In the center you have the Amharic and Oromo people. The Amharic girls do not really look like black Africans at all. I think they look a lot like Indian girls and are often not really dark. Many are quite tall compared to, for instance, Thai or Indonesian girls and often slender in build. The hairstyles are absolutely stunning, and S told me that it is perfectly normal for an Ethiopian girl to spend an average of 2 hours per day on her hairdo and it shows. Many sport a gigantic mass of curly hair (often with fake hair thrown in to make it look even more luxurious). Braids are very famous too and you also see many girls with Rasta type hairstyles. Many do have curly hair by nature. One of the most pleasing assets (in my eyes) they have are their asses, I never seen so many beautiful asses in any country (especially not in Thailand where a girl with a beautiful ass is not that common), but Ethiopian girls (and I believe African girls in general) have the most beautiful asses in the world at least that is my assessment, perhaps I am wrong. I have to admit I am not generally smitten by their looks, face-wise. I think most are not very beautiful at least not to my taste (I am sure tastes differ so you may find them very beautiful). In that regard I think Indonesian girls score higher. In the boobs section they also do not win in my opinion. Many have small breasts, and most are not curvy like Indonesian girls but just slim meaning from the breast side to the hips it runs in a straight line.

Later S and I would travel to the south (Hawasa and Arba Minch) which I will talk about in the next installment. There the girls are usually a lot darker compared to AA (they are not Amharic) and in my opinion a lot prettier and sexier. Although the general consensus in Ethiopia is that Amharic and also Tigray girls are the prettiest girls in Ethiopia my opinion is that the girls in the south are more beautiful.

The (Amharic) girls in AA and further up north in Ethiopia are quite reserved and not easy to approach, at least they appear not to be. When you walk past them it appears they are not looking at you and are not interested but S told me this is just the way the culture works. In reality they are very interested in Western guys and they have a way at looking at a guy without the guy noticing they are looking at him. There are not many Westerners in Ethiopia so the girls are not really used to interacting with western people. Most of them also do not speak any English so that is another problem. Ethiopian girls are also extremely shy and care very much for their reputation.

In the southern towns of Shashemane, Hawassa and Arba Minch it is a very different story which I would later find out. Girls there are a lot more approachable and really like to flirt and smile to any western guy they meet on the street. They are much more carefree and do not care much about reputation or such.

The last 4 days in AA were much the same as the previous 3. Daytime strolls, coffee, Jus and food and some sightseeing followed by nights out in the Piazza. I took 3 more working girls in the last 4 nights. S had told me to try them first to get to know the way to learn to talk to and flirt with Ethiopian girls. First the working girls to make me more confident and after that I could try to move on for the regular girls.

We did not go to the Bole area in the night. It was actually a missed chance. In the Bole area (the upscale area of the city) you find the trendy and expensive nightclubs and bars where the rich and middle class Ethiopians (and most of the western people who stay there) go to party. There you also find working girls in clubs (freelancers) but they tend to be a lot more beautiful than the ones you find in the Piazza but also of course a lot more expensive. In the Bole nightclubs it is also possible to meet a lot of normal girls.

I have to say in Jakarta and Bangkok I went a lot to nightclubs but I never managed to pick up a regular girl in all my years in those places. I just do not know how to approach them and to make them attracted to me. It is an incredible shame because all of the Western guys I have ever met in Jakarta never had any problem picking up whatever beauty they wanted from whatever club or bar no matter if the guy in question was old and fat or young, tall and handsome. It seems to make little difference (although the older and fatter guys pay a bit more often compared to the young and handsome guys). It is very easy to get free pussy for most western guys in Bangkok clubs or Jakarta clubs. Anyway I never managed to succeed. This has made me very depressed for a long time in Jakarta.

At the moment while I am writing this I am again staying in Jakarta for business. I still stay in Jakarta and Pontianak (West Kalimantan where my business is located) around 6 or 7 months per year. The rest of the time I usually spend in my home country, The Netherlands. Nowadays I have a kind of gik style relationship in Jakarta. She visits me around 4 times per week and we have just this week (from Sunday until Thursday) been to Bangkok for a short holiday which was really nice. We stayed in Sukhumvit Soi 12 in the 12th avenue hotel, perhaps not the best hotel but not bad also. For her it was conveniently located close to Terminal 21 shopping mall where she would go shopping in the afternoon while I would lounge at the hotel pool.

Anyway back to Ethiopia: I did not go to Bole clubs because I did not want to spoil my new-found confidence, because even though the girls I picked up in the Piazza were just working girls it still gave me a level of confidence that I could get them for a moderate fee (and all of them were good-looking for Piazza standards). I feared that going to the Bole clubs would give me the same experience as I always have in Jakarta nightclubs, not being able to get a girl there and seeing the other Western guys there hooking up with hotties without even having to try. Although S assured me that there are far less Westerners in the Bole clubs compared to especially Bangkok clubs and also Jakarta clubs which are usually quite full with Western guys, there will always be a number of western guys present in the popular Bole nightclubs, maybe just 15 or 20 but still enough to make me envious and make me lose my confidence. So I decided for this trip I would not visit the clubs in Bole.

I was really looking forward to our trip to the south, starting with Hawassa, I had heard great stories about the south (and the girls there) from my brother and AA started to become quite boring after 7 days there, so on the 7th day in AA we bought a bus ticket to Hawassa, scheduled to leave the next morning at 11 AM, and the last night (for this time because I would come back there later) in AA I went to bed alone that night in a happy mood.

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