New Years Eve

Happy New Year! Yes, it's the beginning of 2001 - Ethiopia follows a different calendar to the UK, so September 10^th is Ethiopian New Years Eve and New Years Day is 11^th September. Despite having many Ethiopian friends in London, I've never celebrated Ethiopian New Year before, so I didn't know what to expect!

On New Years Eve, I went to E and M's house with Y for dinner (pay attention to this, it may become something of a theme ..) - a meal of injera (Ethiopian bread), watt (Ethiopian curry), spinach (which isn't spinach at all, but a kind of cabbage) and shiro (mashed lentils and chick peas). After dinner, we created a 'shubbo' (a fire) in the garden.

M had already made the shubbos (bundles of wood about 10 feet long, all tied together) and gave one each to Y, E and me. He then lit his shubbo from the cooking fire in the house before carrying it outside and then lighting our ones from it. M and E's caught fire without a problem, but mine took ages – apparently even fire has something against faranjis!!

The shubbos are laid down in the shape of a cross on the grass, and the fire continues to burn. According to M, it's the women who have to lead the traditional song – but E had forgotten the words (she's pregnant, she has an excuse) and obviously I was no help at all! So instead, Y put on a Lauryn Hill CD and we danced around the fire to that (there is video evidence, but hopefully it will be destroyed shortly!).

The New Year tradition is to jump over the fire three times, which M and Y did with no problem at all (with M doing a little mid air spin on the 3^rd jump, just to show off!) but I was worried about my jeans catching fire, so I waited until the flames had died down before I attempted it!

Around 11 o clock, M took us somewhere to dance the New Year in. As we drove through Addis, we could see all the shops decorated with bright lights and the streets packed with people dressed in traditional dress and twenty-somethings out to party. Every so often a firework would shoot into the night sky.

We ended up in a club called Gazebo, watching a singer called Ma Dingo, who is quite well known in Ethiopia. As we paid to get in, the heavily pregnant E barely raised an eyebrow, but of course the word 'faranji' was immediately mentioned by the door staff! It makes me tempted to start wearing a mask or something. There wasn't much dancing done by us, but there was a little count down and we all cheered in the New Year.

We tried to move onto somewhere else – this time playing English music – but by now everywhere was so packed there wasn't really enough oxygen left for us all to breathe! Eventually, we admitted defeat and went home to bed, to prepare for the eating marathon that is New Years Day!