Day: January 12, 2020

12 Jan. 2020 In Harar, I hired a guide named Girma, who was loitering on the street outside my guesthouse. We walked through the main square and into Harar Jugol, the walled old city. As we reached the gate, Girma recited a few facts that I'd read in my guidebook: Harar Jugol contains 82 mosques (and two churches) within about one-fifth of a square mile. That's the highest concentration of...

9 Jan. 2020 I wanted to get out of Addis. The dust and noise were getting to me, and I'd started to notice little roach-like insects crawling across the floor by my bed. They were small, but still an order of magnitude larger than my insect comfort zone permitted. If you mentally chop off the barren Somali desert that juts out of the west like a beak, then Ethiopia becomes roughly circular....