Bill"s Adventure - Letter 2

Ethiopia is not only the home of the mother of all humans, Lucy, ( I saw her skeleton replica in the royal palace museum in Addis Ababa)...it is also the birthplace of coffee that grows /grew wild here. Now their major export and source of foreign currency.The goatherders of the mountain regions of Kaffa province , hence coffee,  noticed how frisky their goats became after they ate the red berries.What's good for the goat is good for the herder. After eating the red flesh it wasn't a great leap to  the pit or bean and roasting it.
Eat your heart out Tim Horton. No need for a drive thru here. There are amost as many hole in the wall closet sized coffee shops as there are people. Coffee beans are sold green as Ethiopians all roast their own over tiny charcoal cookers.
in the huge maze of the city market, bushel bags abound full of all spices imaginable and countless bags of various sized raw green coffee beans.

The very best beans cost 100 Birr a kilogram....$5.00 (2.2 pounds). i asked our hotel manager where i could buy roasted beans...not done. He said buy all the green you want and we'll roast it for you here in our roaster...before you go home.Tiny cups of delicious liquid caffeine or latted are 8 Birr..less than 50 cents.Endless cafes serve it from dawn to dusk and there are miles of ones to choose from.

THIS MORNING I WAS WALKING THE FEW BLOCKs ON A MAJOR BOULEVARD going for a coffee before going to the market.Barefoot  and barelegged beggars in green cloaks, Coptic Christian priests looking like figures from biblical days, when i got a poke from behind and was shocked to have a huge mule and owner wanting to get past me on the sidewalk crammed with bootcleaners. Men hurrying by in shepherd robes with staffs and caped others carrying long stems of fresh sugar cane...mobs of people.
The market is right off our main drag..like portage ave.A corn maze would be a minor task compared to the endless narrow muddy, rocky and twisted passages.....everything produced or grown in Ethiopia is here.Treadle sewing machine men will repare or make anything...tinkers, tailers, weavers, hustlers;  I need a guide to get me out. And again croWDED.
Goods are hung many feet above eye level...about 2 feet space between all sides.BARGAIN YOU MUST..