I was in Addis Ababa for work last week, and in addition to drinking coffee, eating shiro, and hacking on DSpace, I managed to get out and see a pretty amazing sight outside of Addis: the Koremash Gorge.
Other than being a bit hazy, it was a beautiful day for a panorama…
I don’t know why this thing isn’t more popular… maybe it’s because of all the old things in north of Ethiopia? There’s more to Ethiopia than obelisks and crazy monks living in caves*!
I snapped this picture of a Coca Cola bottle last week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia:
I thought it was cool to see the famous brand name printed in something other than English. In the Amharic language the four characters spell “Coca Cola” phonetically: Co-ca Co-la. The bottom part apparently says “Trademark.”
If smoking weed, growing dreadlocks, and listening to Bob Marley sounds good to you, you just might be a Rastafarian! There’s a lot more to it than that, but I’ll be damned if I ever meet a “Rasta” who can explain it without mentioning reggae music or marijuana. It’s quite popular here in Kenya, but after meeting dozens of self-proclaimed Rastafarians I still always wonder: do these guys know that Rastafarianism is a religion, or is it just what the cool kids do?
While its roots are in the Back to Africa and black nationalism movements popularized by Marcus Garvey in the 1930s, it has evolved into much more than just a “black hippie” movement. In a nutshell, Rastafarianism is a Judeo–Christian religion that purports the late Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia was the second coming of Jesus Christ (and therefore God incarnate). This and other Rastafarian beliefs are backed by verses from their holy scripture, the Bible.