Photojournal: Ethiopia, Day One

We headed out early Sunday morning to the Raleigh/Durham airport and excitedly said goodbye to Jeremiah's dad. Our trip was really starting! We had enough time to have a nice breakfast at the airport before our flight and found out our waitress, Kidest, was Ethiopian, and from Addis. She was a great source of information and even promised to help interpret for Eli on our way back through.

















Our flight to Dulles from Raleigh was quick and uneventful. Jeremiah was maybe a little bit obnoxious with his excitement. But don't tell him I said that.

We had a nine hour layover in Dulles. Bleh. It would have been miserable, but my Dad and several of my siblings came (they only live about an hour from the DC area) and helped us kill several hours of it. We took the shuttle to the Air and Space Museum and ate lunch together. It was a great way to get my mind off of everything and we really enjoyed our time together!


























































Boarding onto our Ethiopian Air flight felt so surreal. We were really on our way. The sixteen hours on the plane passed about as you would expect sixteen hours on a plane to...slowly. I think I broke my all time tetris high score record on that flight.

We landed in Addis Ababa and made it smoothly through the airport sporting our new tourist visa's and several thousand dollars richer in Ethiopian Birr (their currency which had a very favorable exchange rate for all you fellow frugal-ers reading this...almost 14birr to 1 dollar). Our driver, Abriham, was there holding up signs for us (yea, we felt kind of important) and hurried us to the guesthouse because he wanted to make it back home in time for the world cup game =)

We settled into our room and met a few of the other traveling families from our agency that were staying there as well and then we (attempted) to get some sleep. We had a very big day ahead of us...meeting Eli for the first time.

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