First Night at the Hotel

These are some words of wisdom for those who follow after. By the way, who DOES follow after? We're just wondering what time they'll get here on Saturday, since we'll still be here!

The matresses at the hotel are just a thin (three inches) pad over a box spring. They are quite hard (In fact, Mom, I think the mattress at your house is more comfortable...hahahaha). If you like hard mattresses, you'll be in heaven. If not...well...the couch isn't much better. :) We'll get used to it, I'm sure. We still slept for 11 hours last night since we were so tired. Took melatonin about twenty minutes before bed, like the doctor recommended, and it seemed to work, too. Also, we've been taking the low-dose aspirin and drinking lots of water and so far no problems with the altitude.

Bring PB and Jelly with you! We, unlike some of the families, did NOT like the restaurant for dinner. In fact, neither or us could eat what we ordered. If we'd have ordered the spaghetti, we would probably have been okay. I'll keep you posted on that.

If you bring a power strip, remember to bring a converter to change a three-prong plug to a two-prong. We have the power strip, but no converter, so it's useless. Oh well.

IPOD speakers would be really nice to have, so if you have them, I'd bring them.

There's a hot water tank over the shower that's about 30 gallons or so. Both Marc and I took hot showers this morning and we didn't run out, which was nice. If you take really long showers, though, you might want to alternate who goes first. Otherwise, you should be fine.

And it's really nice to have toilet paper we brought with us. They provide it at the hotel, of course, but it's quite thin and not the most comfortable thing in the world. A few rolls from home would be a good thing.

So we've had breakfast this morning and it was quite good. The chef made us some scrambled eggs and they were really tasty. In addition to that, we had fried bananas, a fried dough round that was similar to a cake doughnut, fried potatoes, corn flakes (milk was a little warm) and some fresh pineapple. It was good, which was nice considering last night.

Last night, I ordered Ethiopian Tibes, which was a beef with peppers and a green chili sauce, which sounded really good. It came with injera. Marc ordered kebabs with a vegetable rice. He couldn't even take more than a bite of his and said the meat tasted off. I took a few bites, but it tasted pretty nasty. So we begged off, told the staff we'd discovered we were far too tired to eat (they were quite concerned about us not eating) and went back to the room where Marc had a milky way bar and I had a cereal bar. We were worried about the breakfast, but it was very good.

Today we meet Duni and Robel in about an hour to go to the Hilton for paperwork and lunch and then to the Transition HOME!! We'll finally meet our boy today!

Did I mention already there are three Spanish families here adopting? They're here for 10 days and they have four boys between them, a one-year old, two four-year-olds, and a seven-year old. They'll be here all week, so there will be other families around, even if it's hard for us to communicate that well. One of the men speaks some English and I speak a smattering of Spanish, so we got a bit of a conversation done this morning (thanks, Dora the Explorer).

I'll try to write more tonight. I'll blog before I go to bed, about the home and about the dinner they're taking us to later at Yod Abbyssinia.