Museums and Line Taxis

Today I went to the National Museum because I got lost on the way to the University's Ethiopian Institute Museum and figured one museum is as good as the next when you don't really know anything about what's inside either one. In the museum I saw Lucy who is the missing link between homo erectus and homo sapiens apparently. She was quite short. I also saw a fairly amazing surrealist painting by an artist named Skunder. It is Untitled so I can't really direct you to an image on the internet easily, but I'll search around for it when I get back in Canada.

To get to the museum I had to take several line taxis on my own, which I am proud to say I managed adequately. For those of you who are unsure what a line taxi is as I was they are a sort of cross between a bus and a taxi that exists when public transit can't handle everyone who needs to use it. They're usually vans although I've seen trucks modified to work as such that the drivers take along specific routes as you would take a bus except they are all privately run and there's hundreds of them leaving all the time along most major routes. Here they are blue, but when I encountered them in Mexico they were green. Also they are much much cheaper than a taxi cab. Essentially they are a privately run group of microbusinesses that take the place of public transit. They are also quite confusing if you don't know the city as the call-guy who shouts out their destination shouts quite rapidly and it all sounds like a lot of jibberish if you don't pay close attention. I caught the right ones although I've heard of people getting horribly lost on account of a misheard shout or two.

Currently I'm in the capital... still... but I'm leaving for Gondor tomorrow. Since spelling of Amheric words is phonetic it is apparently "OK" to spell it that way which is fairly awesome, as I thought you had to spell it with and A or an E (although I wasn't sure which). I will be living in a hotel there while furniture is found for my house. I think my next post will be on the thriving hotel industry here and why it is so thriving. Stay tuned!

Jordie out