Alex Little

Turns out that the signing and dancing I mentioned yesterday is the Ashenda festival. It also goes on for several days, so I’m still getting stopped in the street and asked for money!

In an attempt to avoid getting stopped quite so often I thought it’d be better to go out on my bike. This mainly worked, though there we a few times when I was almost knocked off by groups of kids trying to stop me to give them money! Fortunately I was going quite slowly and didn’t actually get knocked off. Out on the bike I was able to do some more mapping for OpenStreetMap, adding some roads that I don’t usually walk along. After uploading these updates for OpenStreetMap I took a look at Mekelle on Google Maps. Last time I looked, several months ago now, there was virtually nothing marked, but now there’s almost a complete map. I’m interested to know where they got this data from, given that most of the printed maps I’ve seen of this region aren’t great and certainly don’t include many of the new residential areas on the outskirts of town.

Yesterday I also went to the cinema for the first time I’ve been back, to watch Teza, an Ethiopian film about a doctor returning to his home village near Lake Tana during the 70′s and 80′s. Although depressing in parts, it was well worth watching – the film won best film at an African film festival earlier this year. I had expected it to mainly be in Amharic, hopefully with English subtitles, but it was actually almost all in English. For info, the word ‘teza’ roughly translates as drop or drip.

If anyone feels like posting something over to me then anything, postcards, packet cheese sauce, etc, it would be much appreciated… the address is:

PO Box 3060
Mekelle University
Mekelle
Tigray
Ethiopia

Cheers!