More on Dire Daoua

I'm writing this back in our hotel in Addis and I must admit that I already miss Dire Daoua! It's a charming little town with a little over 300,000 inhabitants and an equal amount of "bajaj"s (tri-wheel blue and white taxis) swarming around picking up and people and dropping them off for a mere 1 birr per person (that's the equivalent of 4 euro centimes).

We had barely 24 hours to get a feel of D Dawa, but we did get to loiter around in our  suits taking photos with locals and gathering quite a substantial amount of attention! The town is muuch calmer and greener than Addis, with wildly coloured houses and shops, and trees lining most of it's small streets.

One setback in Dire Dawa was that we had no water for the length of our stay. It has to be said that water in Ethiopia (notably water coming our of a shower head in a cubicle) is a luxury, and it's perfectly normal for some districts to go without running water for days. We had no luck in this department and had to go for 2 concerts, and 2 twelve hour bus rides without a good shower.  It's not the most pleasant of things, but it does put things in perspective in a way that makes you prioritise on what's really essential and what isn't...

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The concert at the Alliance Francaise in Dire Daoua was a lot of fun.  Not much different than the one at the Goethe Institute in Addis, people remained sitting down but participated loudly with singing and clapping in the most unexpected of places! We're usually used to clapping at the end of songs and solos, but Africans clap when they feel they have to clap, be it the middle of a loud solo, at the beginning of a melody they recognise...wherever!

It was heart warming to see the audience stand up to clap at the end of our show and we were lucky enough for the concert to be televised on Dire Daoua TV! Many thanks to Vincent and all his team at the Alliance  in D Daoua for this concert.

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Next up are a last series of concerts at Addis (including one tonight at a club called "A la Votre" and a couple of days off during which god knows what we'll get up to!

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ps...many apologies for all the spelling mistakes in these posts but I lack the luxury to re-read my posts and proof readers are not an option!