October 18th (Day 4)

 eating, shopping, sightseeing

On October 18th the Lovins had their court date and Matt and I stayed in at our guesthouse and just relaxed for awhile. We were told that we might get to visit Solomon if the Lovins got back in time but unfortunately we were not able to. Our guesthouse was located pretty far from the court building.  Gladney only allowed us to visit around 9-10am. Well we decided to celebrate the Lovin family passing court and went to have lunch at the Lime Tree. This place became one of our favorites to eat at. They have an amazing Lime juice that I got every single time we ate there...they had lots of desserts that looked amazing but I never got any. We were all still pretty jet lagged but decided to go shopping.

We went to the souvenir shops near the post office area.  You can negotiate your prices here, but Matt and I were not very good at this....plus we were still figuring out price conversion. I would suggest taking a calculator. We ended up getting some wooden animals, a ball for Solomon, a tea set and a few other things. There are lots of beggars around this area...it was pretty heart breaking.

We then drove up to Entoto mountain area and stopped along the side of the road to take a few pictures. These pictures were taken with our video camera as our camera battery was dead. There are woman who carry eucalyptus branches down the mountain...don't know how they do it. 

 The Lovins decided to go back and rest at the guesthouse. Matt and I wanted to do some more sightseeing so we asked our driver what he recommended doing and he suggested the Lion Zoo. I had heard that it was pretty sad and not much to see, but our driver was so excited about taking us that we decided to go. The animals are kept in small concrete cages.

Our wonderful driver, Solomon, knew how to make this baboon do some tricks such as opening his mouth and had the crowd of people laughing. Watching him do this was the best part. We also had some people from Asia who wanted to take a picture with us..kind of strange this happened several more times throughout our time in Ethiopia.

We then went to Lucy's for dinner for our last night as a couple of two. Lucy's was also another restaurant I would recommend. We had so much excitement/nervousness to think that tomorrow we would hopefully be granted the right to parent our little man.