Coffee

This is one of the few Amharic words I now know: Buna (boo-na). I gave up coffee three years ago on a trip to Asia, but I am not going to be a complete jackass idiot and come to the birthplace of coffee and not drink coffee every day, multiple times a day. This is great shit. Even the guesthouse coffee that comes out of a thermos is legit.

So I will stop for coffee anywhere here and in fact the first half of our days that are largely spent waiting for embassy paperwork and bullshit TB tests (evidently to assuage conservatives that are horrified all children born outside the US have TB even while refusing to get their own kids vaccinated) are dedicated to trying a new coffee spot. The traditional spots are located in pretty much every other roadside shack here – no signage needed. Women sit and roast the beans, pound them in a wooden pestle and then boil the coffee with water in a small vessel over a coal fire. It’s a pretty bad-ass thing to watch and even better to smell, but many Ethiopians will be clear, these spots are very authentic, but that doesn’t mean that (by their standards) they are good.

-Small digression, as you can see in the photo, in some coffee joints you can get a little plant tucked into your cup of coffee. My wife freaked when she saw this since she knows this plant from her Peace Corps days in Paraguay as “Ryuda.” And it does add a very floral flavor to the coffee (I’m not going to get into a bunch of ridiculous shit about florality, terroir, essence or anything else like that). This has only been offered at one spot, so I assume it is super fancy style and not part of the regular gig.

To me, the coffee is remarkable for the chocolate flavor and the better quality the coffee the longer that chocolate flavor lasts. 

The best coffee I’ve had so far has been at a sort-of modern spot that is not at all a roadside shack called Roberra. Hands-down unreal coffee all the way through. Too good to not have two cups and another visit.

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If you’re trying to find it, it’s located about four traffic jams away on the other side of the half-finished railroad tracks and across the street from a bunch of construction, down the road from a makeshift bucket carwash people drive into from all directions.

The fucking traffic here is unreal! I thought we were really speeding the other day, flying, suddenly out on the open road! I looked over at the speedometer and we were doing 25. People drive on the wrong side of the road, there’s not always a wrong side of the road, they know the exact dimensions of the their cars and test those dimensions at every opportunity, half the streets have no sidewalks so people walk in the streets, which is to say nothing of the regular herds of goats on major fucking roads, donkeys in almost every traffic circle and the fact that there seem to be maybe a dozen or so traffic lights in town half of which might be working at any given time. Also, you can somehow be stopped by police and given a traffic ticket. This is unfathomable to me. Given what passes for normal traffic behavior I have no idea what you must do to get such a ticket. Really, you must have to basically run over a donkey, hit a goat, sideswipe a coffee seller, plow into a soviet-era taxicab and flick off a traffic cop.

And I’ve only seen evidence of one traffic accident.