March 12 - Crossing Our Fingers

I forgot to mention that yesterday, the power was out from noon until about 6 pm. Walking up five flights of stairs at 8000 feet above sea level (for a midwesterner) is really really hard. Add a thirty pound child into the mix and it just gets more fun...My legs were so tired.

Anyway, this morning we woke up a little early, around 6:45. We had a nice steam bath for Sintayehu and then mommy and daddy took showers. Of course, we ran out of hot water. Oh well, I survived. Just got a little chilly is all. Here's some pictures of our hotel room:

The bathroom - you can't see the shower, but it's to the right. It was a nice bathroom, honestly. And the shower was not too bad (I'm a shower snob, so that's saying something!)

This is our living room. Marc is helping Sintayehu look out the window, so that's who you see. There's a small fridge and a cabinet around to the left and two chairs and a couch, as well as a TV that didn't get good reception on any station except CNN. We're really tired of CNN.

This was the bedroom. The crib is to the right, but you can see we had a king sized bed. Of course, it was very hard, but it was clean and once you fell asleep, it wasn't so bad. Three rooms were luxurious.

Breakfast was ala carte instead of buffet, so we ordered scrambled eggs for all three of us and "Corn Flex." Ha. They looked and tasted just like corn flakes, so I'm assuming it was just a typo. It was pretty funny, though. And the milk is whole - eeeewwww - so I didn't use very much of it. Sintayehu ate everything we put in front of him, faster than he probably should have.

Since the internet was still down (how frustrating) we went back up to the room to play. Robel was going to come about 10 and we were planning on descending on the Consulate. Once Robel showed up, he let us know we needed to wait for Duni to call, so we sat in the lobby and waited. The call came, and it wasn't good news. Our fingerprints are still not at the Embassy, and without them, we can't get a Visa for Sintayehu. At this point, unless the Embassy takes pity on us, we're stuck until next week. Visas are not processed on Fridays so we start to panic a little.

I think Robel was embarassed (though it wasn't his fault) and I feel sorry for him, since I know we weren't good company that day. We were really upset, though we had to find something to occupy our time. We went and visited a coffee factory before lunch and it was really very cool! We saw the process from start to finish and learned that beans are exported unroasted to other countries, with the language of the importer screened on the bag. We got to walk thgough the room with the machine that sorts the beens through several sieves to get a uniform size, then into the picking room where the workers sit along conveyor belts and pick through the beans by hand. This is the machine that sorts with sieves.

And after all the beans got sorted, they got roasted. This is the roaster below, which is next to a grinder.

The factory smelled SO good. There were large tubs of roasted beans in the room and once the lids came off, the smell wafted through the room like it was sent by heaven. But we couldn't buy any coffee that day because the power was out, so we didn't get to see the machines working, but I think that was better. Had they been working, they would have been LOUD.

We went to lunch at Metro Pizza, which was very tasty. Sintayehu was a pain in the butt, but he was tired so what do you expect? We took him back to the hotel for a nap and he screamed for an hour and a half. I'm not kidding, I watched the clock. And HOUR and a HALF of screaming. It was amazing. We finally let him out without napping.

At 4:00, I called DHL and they informed me that a package was delivered to the Embassy at 3:30...is it our package? Hopefully! So that made things a bit brighter. We just have to hope now that the Embassy takes pity on us and processes a VISA on a day they normally don't so we can leave when we're supposed to.

So we decide to go to dinner at the Lime Tree and guess what...Mr. Tired and Cranky Pants falls asleep in the car and slept the entire way through dinner. We had pasta and steaks and they were lovely, but my alfredo sauce was pink because of the Berbere spice they put in EVERYTHING! We got a cookie to go and woke up the snoozer and fed him cookie in the car. It worked enough that we got him home awake and played for awhile before going to bed.

I also had a long talk with Duni, which made me feel better. I know they're doing what they can, we just have to pray for tomorrow.