A walk around Merkato

After my weekly Saturday walk around Churchill and Bole, the boys called me asking me if I wanted to join them for an aimless walk around the biggest Market in East Africa - the Ethiopian Merkato.....

My last attempt of walking around Merkato was a big failure..... My excellent sense of direction (note the sarcasm) made me believe that I'll manage to find the way from Piazza to Merkato..... obviously it was not at all successful, instead of Merkato I found streets smelling of rotten food and drainage, got terribly lost, until I gave up and took a taxi home, to exhausted to bother asking the taxi to take me to Merkato.

So when this proposal came up I grabbed the opportunity and went....... You can never be bored of Merkato..... 1000s of people running errands, buying spices, pottery, clothes, shoes, electronics, furniture, cloth and anything else you can think of - mention it, Merkato has it!!!
We walked around aimlessly to the recurrent cry of 'faranji, faranji, money give me', or 'you, you' or the occasional 'tissue, tissue one birr, one birr'. Until the car fumes suffocated us and we decided to check out the new Kaldi's (Starbucks wannabe) in Old Bole...

Ahh I also managed to get the traditional clay coffee pot for an amazing non-faranji price (or so I think) of 11Birr, my Amharic was also the laughing stock of the day...

A glimpse of Merkato.....

The rope shop


A snack bar.... or rather Kitfo bar...

The box shop

A big church in the Merkato.... Merkato is one of the few places in Addis that has a Mosque and a Church next to eachother, and where both Church and Mosque compete in loudness when its prayer call time.......