Time is Flyin!

So it has officially been 1 week since we landed in Ethiopia! To me it seems like we landed yesterday, but to some of the others they say it feels like we've been here for a month. But whatever the time feels like to us we have not been more privileged to be part of the things we have done and the things we have seen. Yesterday, Marcos, (our taxi driver/tour guide/linguistics teacher/translator/friend) took us to Merkato, Africa's largest open air market. That is one crazy place. It is so large that each 'block', I guess you could say, was a different section. And each section was specific to different things. Such as spices, shoes, women's fashion (bad mistake to stop there, really challenged us guys with our patience) traditional things, and many more. Because of its enormity, we had to choose two or three sections that we wanted to spend some time in. Bargaining is big in this culture. So, I had some fun trying out this new style of buying things. It kind of makes shopping fun. We have a competition between the team to see who can get the best deal. I hold the lead with bringing down the price 50%. Marcos says with his strong Amharic accent "you know right price". Though we have fun trying to bargain, we leave the real bargaining to Marcos.
Today we had a blast. We rented a coaster bus, (mini grayhound) and took the kids and staff of the orphanage out on a field trip. The kids were apparently so excited the evening prior to the 'big day' they barely slept. I think their excitement may have been different if they had known entertaining level of a museum is quite low. But they had a lot of fun running around and taking millions of photos with our camera's. Though a museum may be hard place to lose energy, the kids found a way to get exhausted and it was only 1 in the afternoon. So, with the field trip over sooner than we thought, we decided to take the bus we rented for the day up to Entoto - a mountaintop viewpoint where Emperor Menelik II first saw the land in which he would found Addis. And the view was one fit for an.... Emperor. There is a little village up there that surrounds an ancient temple and palace. Life on Entoto looks tough. We passed countless women carrying massive amounts of wood on their backs down the mountain and water jugs up. Even though, everyday we get more and more acclimatized to this foreign land we are visiting, it is still tough to see so many people in hard life situations. I wish that I had so much more to give them. God is good, he is alive and he is working. Thank you for continuing to pray for us and following our journey. Ciao!
- Erik