Vadim and Eritrea

Me and Vadim at the Intercontinental Hotel


Inside the Bus to Keren
With Vadim here now I am having a lot of fun, showing him all the sights to see in Asmara, visiting all my regular cafes like Asmara Sweets, and Galaxy Cafe, for macchiatos and fresh pastries, visiting my favorite places for fresh juice, checking out the markets, etc. He has already met most of my international and Eritrean friends here and I think he is starting to feel a little at home. The climate is pretty mild so it hasn’t been a big adjustment for him, as usually its somewhere around 20 degrees in Asmara, not really hot enough to wear shorts, but warm enough to go without a jacket. However, somehow Vadim still managed to get a sunburn. Now all we need to do is find him some meaningful place to volunteer and/or work and it would be perfect. He may work with me at NUEW helping my collegeau Mobrato with his computer training classes and maintance of the computers in the office. He is also trying to track down the Russian Embassy, to see if there is anything he can do there. As well he thought about trying to get into working as an intern with one of the many UN agencies here( WHO, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNDP, UNMEE, WFP, etc…).

This weekend, we took a trip and left Asmara to visit Keren. I went my first week and really enjoyed my trip and so I thought it might be nice for Vadim to also see Karen, and catch a glimpse of what life is like beyond Asmara. Before we headed out on the bus, we were invited for lunch. Belanyesh, my co-worker (head of international relations at NUEW) invited us to eat lunch with her extended family, as her mother lives near the bus station to Keren and said it would be perfect for us to eat lunch and then hop on our bus with a full belly- so like usual we didn’t pass up the offer. After a nice lunch, we started out 2.5 hour bus trip to Karen. We got there and went straight to the Keren hotel, which we were told has one room on the roof of the hotel with a spectacular view, but unfortunately an Indian couple got there just before us and were also interested in the room -so we were out of luck. We decided we would come back later for a drink at the bar on the roof with the view, but would otherwise prefer another hotel. We ended up at a cute little hotel, where the staff where incredibly friendly, however where nobody spoke any English, which was quite strange as in Asmara, usually you always have someone who speaks at least some English. In any case, it gave me a chance to practice my Tigrinya, as the past 3 weeks I have been taking regular classes at the language school downtown in Asmara. One of the girls at the hotel loved my hair, I had it back in a pony tail, as I hadn’t washed it in a couple days, due to lack of water, but she sure didn’t think it was greasy, as she got a bottle of PURE OIL to put on my hair when she put my hair in braids. It was too funny, me and Vadim just had to laugh and enjoy the moment of me with my oiled up hair!

The next day we ate breakfast at the hotel and then walked around the market, bought a few things from the brightly dressed Tigre women sitting in the streets. And then after a couple hours we decided we wouldn’t stay another day and took the bus back to Asmara. If we were to stay we could've visited the famous Keren Camel Market, where you can see hundreds of different camels and where you can apparently buy your very own camel for around 10,000 Nkfa (about $500).