Birthplace of Coffee

As most of you know, this entire trip was made possible by a Teacher Creativity Fellowship from the Lilly Endowment.  They gave me some $$ to go experience the "Birthplace of Coffee," which - of course - happens to be in Sidama, Ethiopia, the birthplace of Amare and Zenebe!  This also created the delightful excuse to stop at as many coffee shops/buna bet as possible during our travels.  

This was a little place on the side of a major road interchange in Addis.  We stopped for a treat to console ourselves because the restaurant we were headed to was closed on Mondays, and we hadn't known.  The consolation coffee was necessary because the trip involved an expensive taxi ride, and then a hike up and then back down the steep hill.  These little buna bet are everywhere and they serve up the traditional thickly boiled, amazingly strong stuff in teeny cups.  You add enough sugar so that the cup is almost overflowing and sip it down.   Not all of them serve the charcoal burner with incense and the sprig of rue for garnish, so this was particularly awesome!  

This is a "cappuccino" at Kaldi's Coffee.  Kaldi's is an Ethiopian combination of Starbucks and Applebee's (or what I imagine Applebee's are still like; I haven't been inside one since high school).  They serve coffee drinks, but also burgers, fries, etc.  At this point, I was starting to realize that the Starbucks versions of "cappuccino" and "macchiato" don't mean the same thing in Ethiopia.  (I suppose this should not be surprising, since aren't we all constantly confused by Starbucks' grande/tall/venti sizing scheme?)   An Ethiopian cappuccino is an American mocha.  A macchiato is more like what Starbucks calls a cappuccino.  And then they have the "ranger" macchiato! This is a macchiato with extra espresso so that the milk and coffee swirl to look like a camouflage police "ranger" uniform.  Too bad I didn't learn about that one till our last week in the country.  

Sweet little buna bet on the lakeshore of Hawassa.

Here I am squeezed into the historical coffee roasters in the old Piazza district of Addis Ababa. We visited To-Mo-Ca on our first trip to Addis Ababa, and it was where I clued in that coffee was really everything to Ethiopians.  This teeny place is packed to the gills with tourists and Ethiopians ALL THE TIME!  The staff wear lab coats and take themselves quite seriously.  Originally an Italian enterprise back in the day, the story goes that the owner wound up marrying his Ethiopian cashier and now her family runs the place.  Amare and Zenebe thought it was hilarious that the only seat open in the place was under the "USA Type" roast bin, and so they snapped this photo of me.  They also wondered why there was no "Ethiopian Type" bin, so I found myself trying to explain that only outside of Ethiopia are we Europeans and Americans silly enough to roast our coffee hours/days/weeks/years (gasp!) before we grind and then brew it.