We boarded our flight to Ethiopia at 9:00pm Eastern on Monday night. We had an hour layover in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire where we had to stay on the plane before flying to Addis Ababa. We landed in Addis at 4:00pm eastern (11:00pm local time) on Tuesday — 19 hours on the plane.

It’s a weird feeling to lose an entire day. I slept some, worked about eight hours, slept a little more, watched tv, watched a movie, played some word games, chatted with our seat mate and Lewis, ate dinner, ate breakfast, ate lunch.

I wish we had a little more time here in Ethiopia so I could see more of this country, what I’ve seen so far was beautiful. The air was cool this evening when we disembarked, and would have been refreshing, if not for the overwhelming scent of jet fuel.

We’re flying Ethiopian airlines, and they have a lovely program where if you have a long overnight layover they will put you up at a hotel (a really nice one) and give you vouchers for dinner and for breakfast. It took a long time to get checked-in, but we’re finally in our hotel room, and looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep in a bed before our flight into Malawi tomorrow morning.

Dinner was lovely, especially because I got to have injera. I love injera (there is a wonderful family in our congregation in NYC that are from Ethiopia and they’ve made it for us before).

Injera is a staple here, and is a sourdough flatbread that looks similar to a pancake, but much more spongey, it’s typically rolled up after cooking and you tear off a piece and use it to pick up and eat your food.