Ethiopia III: Gondar

 Mike and Camille both brought their fancy cameras to Ethiopia, and they both like character shots, so we stopped several times, on our drive from Bahir Dar to Gondar on August 26, 2019, to take photos of villagers.  One stop was near the first of “God’s fingers,” tall, relatively narrow outcroppings covered in greenery.

  Mike took several photos of a little girl, about 8, carrying her baby sister.  Each time we stopped, the children clustered around, motioning that they wanted candy or a pen or ‘bir” (money), or just saying “hello” and giving high fives.  One little girl wanted to pat my white hands and look at my rings.  She was not particularly impressed with the diamonds, but she oohed and aahed over my gold wedding band.

 We ate lunch at “Four Sisters,” an excellent Ethiopian restaurant in Gondar.  We met one of the four sisters and filled our plates with injera and a dozen fillings—“tibs” (spicy beef or lamb), several types of lentils, spicy chicken, cooked beets, chopped spinach, and a tomato and onion salad.

 We spent the afternoon visiting the huge Gondar castle complex and learning about the Ethiopian kings who ruled there from 1632 to the late 1700s.  King Fasil was the first one, and the king who dismissed the Portuguese Jesuit priests who had converted his father to Catholicism.  Each of the four castles in Gondar was built by a separate monarch, and then the whole complex was used as a headquarters for the invading Italian Army during World War II.  The roof of one of the castles had been bombed by the British in their attempt, in 1941, to free Ethiopia from the Italians.  The castle complex looked European, but is so isolated from European civilization.

 The ancient Ethiopian church language, Gez, is semitic, as is Amharic, the present day official Ethiopian language.  Many Ethiopians, such as this man, look more like Israelis or Palestinians than Africans!

 We visited the religious building with moat where worshippers gather from all over Ethiopia each year to be blessed by the priests and to dive into the green moat.