Day 1 — Is this really Africa?
My plane in booming Ethiopian Airlines with it’s recent fleet and a major African hub, landed from Madrid at around 8am in Addis Ababa. When I got off the plane, it was cloudy, it rained heavily afterwards, and it was cold. I wondered if I had embarked in the right plane. After all… isn’t Africa about hot sunny weather?
On my way to the immigration lane, I did a detour to the bathroom and saw a mosquito. Whenever I go to this latitudes — be it Africa or elsewhere I generally fear mosquitoes — but I was 2355m high so there isn’t malaria risk at such high altitude. Nonetheless I started to sink in that I was in the right place. In addition when I continued my journey, there it was the Ebola screener.
At the hotel the first colleagues were taking breakfast and I joined Kotheid, Program Manager for SAP Social Sabbatical and Julia who is presales for SAP Education in EMEA for a very interesting conversation on water shortages — specially as in Cape Town it was close to day zero in 2018 and the stress it entails living on water shortage with 50L per person per day — this stress has now migrated to Sydney in Australia where water reservoirs are going down 0.4% per week.
When we went for lunch, some struggle withdrawing money from ATM’s which is quite awkward given the abundance of ATM’s but eventually we got over it. By the way it’s always best to have both Visa and Mastercard and if possible from different financial institutions like Revolut and its competitors.
At the restaurant our first Ethiopian food experience — Injera and… coffee with popcorn! Yes Ethiopians drink coffee with either popcorn or roasted chickpeas :)
On the way back a lot of children beggars which is kind of shocking considering the foreign word they knew ‘hungry’.
