We've had a pretty fantastic past few days here! You know why? Because Ethiopia is just a fantastic sort of place. I think I love it here. A lot.
Two nights ago, Kendra and I were returning home from somewhere. I don't actually remember where we were because sometimes I have a very bad memory. The important thing is, we were walking up to our house and thought, hey we should probably lay outside and look at the stars! We've always talked about how pretty they are here because you can see so many of them. We hadn't actually taken time to look at them though. So we made a plan to go inside, get a blanket to lay on, and head out front.
We did exactly that, and turned off all the lights in the house. Desta even turned off the light in his little room for us! The Ethiopians thought we were pretty funny, laying on the concrete and rock ground, but we were loving it. Desta and Amare laid with us for a bit, but I don't think they appreciated it as much as us. Amen said, "Wow, I love your style!" when he saw us camping out...but he claimed the ground was too hard for him to lay on. Wimp. We laid there for a very long time, and got incredibly excited when we saw the best shooting star of my life! It was super duper bright, and went pretty far! Epic. We repeated this last night, and even upgraded the experience with pillows and a sleeping bag. Comfortable, beautiful, and we saw more shooting stars. Seriously, I don't think a night can get much better than that.
Yesterday morning, we took on the challenge of making pancakes American style. My mom emailed me her recipe, and we found all the ingredients. The tricky parts were measuring and cooking. We had to eyeball all the measurements, but I think we did a pretty wonderful job! Then, we headed to our little mini stove and tried making one pancake. Super fail. We got a little discouraged, because this pancake was just messed up. But after some changes in butter and pans, we ended up with some pancakes that actually looked like legit pancakes! We got a little over excited when we flipped the first pancake that actually turned out...we may have shouted really loudly, alarming Desta who was in the kitchen doing dishes. But we were pumped, so what are you gonna do. It happens. Anyways, the pancakes were pretty good. Though they would have been better had we had syrup. When we asked for syrup for the pancakes, Amare offered to go to the pharmacy and buy some cough syrup. We explained to him that that wouldn't taste too good on pancakes...
Today is Valentine's Day. Yes, they do indeed celebrate Valentine's Day in Ethiopia! I don't think it's as big as it is in America, but it's here nonetheless. We have some pretty big plans for our first Valentine's Day in Africa, and I'm pretty much loving it thus far. We started the morning off by going out to breakfast. Fancy, right?! Afterwards, we went to the awesome grocery store where we first discovered African Betty Crocker. We had the exciting idea of making and decorating sugar cookies for all our Ethiopian friends. After all, they get pretty excited when we talk about making cookies ever since that fateful day when we introduced them to cookie dough. We had seen frosting and food coloring there, so we were pretty pumped. Well, turns out they didn't have sugar cookies. Or vanilla frosting. They only had lemon frosting, which didn't sound like it would taste so good with chocolate, peanut butter, or chocolate chip cookies. Since we didn't think we could find all the ingredients to make sugar cookies from scratch, we improvised. We purchased the lemon frosting (not the best, but alas, our only choice), and two packages of plain cookies to decorate. And decorate we did. They look pretty awesome. Basically like really expensive cookies straight out of a bakery. We've given some away already, and they've made people pretty darn happy (because they were so touched by our thoughtfulness or...possibly because they think we're hilarious and our cookies looked ridiculous). So far Amare, Masresha, and Desta have received these delicious gifts from us. Lucky peeps! We've got a lot more that we're looking forward to passing out. Should be a good time.
We'll be finishing off our wonderful African Valentine's Day with an afternoon at the school with the kids and another night of looking at the stars...this time with even more upgrades. We're planning on bringing out more pillows. It's going to be pretty much like a bed out there. In fact, we just might bring an actual bed out. Why not? We can easily grab a mattress off one of the extra beds, and I think laying on it outside would be putting it to pretty good use. Sounds fantastic to me!
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