Soccer Dad

Ethiopia has fascinated me for some time. Beyond the misery of the poverty caused by multiple factors including brutal state violence, the country's religious, cultural and linguistic history is simply amazing, at least to me.

Amharic, Ethiopia's largest and official language, is a Semitic language written left-to-right, using a syllabary rather than an alphabet, with clear roots shared for some words with Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic.

Ethiopia was never colonized; the Italians tried and lost in battle. Accordingly, some of the anti-white, anti-colonialist resentment found in some parts of Africa doesn't apply in Ethiopia; the colonists got shot, gave up and signed a peace treaty.

In metropolitan DC alone, approximately 200,000 people are said to be of Ethiopian descent. Ethiopian cuisine is a major "ethnic eating out" cuisine down here, with multiple clusters of Ethiopian restaurants in the region outsizing DC's Chinatown.

Among the most fascinating sites in Ethiopia are the monolithic churches at Lalibela and elsewhere: small churches carved out of one massive piece of stone. Ethiopia is heavily Orthodox Christian, in communion with the so-called "Oriental" churches that rejected the Council of Chalcedon which the rest of Christianity accepted, but with increasing cultural ties to Constantinople.

Addis Ababa is not for the faint of heart but I definitely want to visit.