Coffee Ceremony

So here is the coffee ceremony.  We had a wonderful time with our newfound friends, Kiros and his wife, whose name is something like Natalia, though in Tigre, the language of the north where they come from. (An interesting aside, is that they speak Tigre to each other, but Amharic to their three children.)  First we had injere, the yeasty pancake made of a special grain called tef, with a sour flavor. It comes in huge circles which they tear up and give you pieces. You then use the injera as your silverware to dish up the wat. We had two kinds of wat. One was sliced beef with hot peppers, with sauce of the beef to put on it.. The other was yellow peas with onion, garlic, pepper, cooked until the peas were smooth.It was all delicious! (And we didn't get sick during the night after eating it either--Yeh!)

In the meantime, the charcoal brazier was lighted and the charcoal was cooking.  A young woman who lives with them, probably their cook or housegirl to help with the three kids, put green coffee beans in a small fry pan and heated them on the charcoal until they got smokey, started to smell burnt and smoke started pouring off the pan. Then she brought the pan over to us to smell, directly the smoke in our direction. As a guest, you are supposed to fan the smoke towards you to smell it and appreciate the odor. It does smell good!  Then she went outside in the courtyard and ground the beans with a mortar and pestle.She put grounds in the bottom of the little black pottery vessel you can see on the left side of the photos, resting in a metal holder. This black pot is the coffee pot. Even before roasting the beans she had put water in it and put it in the charcoal to heat for a long time.

Then when the beans were ground and put in the pot, she heated milk. Finally she poured the milk into the bottom of the demitasse cups, poured coffee on top of the milk and served it to us.  Most people add sugar, though we didn't. Fresh roasted cooked Ethiopian coffee can't be beat, I think!

Tonight we go to another coffee ceremony, so we will have a point of comparison. I'll report in!

We had another wonderful experience yesterday.  Belette, a man we met last year when we were here in Addis, who is a local pastor, came looking for us and volunteered to be our tour guide and take us around the city. We were thrilled.  So Thursday he is taking us for a few hours, and Saturday for the whole day. So we should get a much better opportunity to see more of the city, including some of the museums and tourist sites.