Sunrise over Awassa, from Tabor Hill. The "wall" of hills the sun is just appearing over marks the Eastern edge of the Rift Valley.

Shopping is a very different experience from shopping at home. At home almost everything has a price which is displayed and is non-negotiable. Most shopping experiences in the UK involve freely browsing through an obscene variety of different items, and then taking your chosen item to a till where you pay, with little or no interaction with the sales person. Here nothing has a price and interaction is the very essence of successfully buying what you want. For example, I wear flip-flops in our house (not just for comfort but so I don’t feel the crunch if I step on a creepy crawly) and one of them died on Wednesday. Nearby, there’s a vegetable stall we often go to and I remembered that the stall next to it sold shoes. Now, you can’t simply browse in a shop here, because the shopkeeper instantly latches onto you and tries very hard to sell you whatever he thinks you want, at the most inflated price he thinks he can get away with. The shoe stall is run by a small boy (called Morgos) who must be about 12 years old and speaks very broken English. He’s a charming character who reminds me of a young Ethiopian version of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. We started our negotiation over a pair of flip-flops and he proposed 10 birr. As a ferenji you get used to being constantly ripped off, but this time I had the advantage of remembering how much I paid for my last pair of flip-flops – 8 birr. So, Morgos and I smiled, laughed and exchanged exaggerated expressions of amazement at the prices under discussion, while I also enjoyed bargaining in Amharic. The result – 7 birr!!! We concluded our transaction with Morgos going through the motions of asking for an extra birr, to which we both laughed. I normally can’t be bothered with the necessary evil of bargaining, but negotiating with Morgos really made my day.