Bombs in various places

According to Xinhuanet (a Chinese news site), the Ethiopian Federal Police defused two C4-based bombs in a public bus on Friday. And then another one went off at a chicken store, of all things. At 6AM. Apparently it cracked a wall. Thankfully I don't buy my chicken there (Bole is just too far away), and I definitely don't catch busses (not those type, anyway). If this is true, I guess the Department of Foreign Affairs and Tourism was not completely out of their tree after all. Who knows who the culprits were, however.

In other, less explosive, news, we (that being, the staff at Bingham) just returned from a relaxing weekend at Babugaya, a retreat centre on a scenic crater lake about an hour and a half's drive from Addis. The most exciting event (in a negative way) was narrowly missing an Ethiopian woman who was running in the middle of a particularly dark section of the road.

We also saw the two episodes of the Amazing Race which went through Ethiopia. We had heard about this about three months ago, and were anticipating the racers arguing with customs officials, struggling with local public transport, being accosted by beggars and sleeping on the street with some of the locals outside one of the local monuments, waiting for it to open. Instead, they had to put mud/animal manure onto walls, put a roof on a hut, coral a pair of donkeys, match a cross-shaped necklace and run a 4x400m relay. It seems that reality is not all it's cracked up to be...