Our Ethiopian Adventure 2015: Day 3 - exploring Addis... when too much shopping is never enough :-)

After our first night at the Debre Damo hotel, it was out and about for the day with general sightseeing, shopping for traditional clothes for the women, and then visits to the "bullets to beads" jewelry workshops and the nearby fair-trade spinners, weavers, and potters operations.
We drove up a significant hill to see the view back over the city, and what impressed us most were rhe women and the donkeys carrying firewood down from the hill. Ethiopia has been planted (many decades ago) with Australian eucalypt trees and these are harvested very young - trunks around 100mm - for scaffolding in the city, stick & mud house construction in the country, and firewood everywhere.
During the day we shopped interminably for clothes, scarves, and trinkets. I say "interminably" because, as the only male in a group of 12 women, I was shopped-out after around 15 minutes and spent the rest of the day exercising extreme patience!
We saw jewelry being made at a fair-trade enterprise, employing 100% hiv-positive women, and using metal recycled from mostly spent bullet casings from the "red terror" period when the communist regime in the 1980s used methods similar to Pol Pot to control the people with a terrible genocide.
Then after a visit to the scarf shop aand a walk through their spinning and weaving workshops we went to the chaos of "mercato", the central unregulated marketplace for everything imaginable. Elias (our guide) paid a policeman to follow our group as he was leading, to keep us clear of potential pickpockets!
We finished an exhausting day with dinner in our hotel :-)