Clean, quiet, agreeable – is this what comes into your mind when you think about Africa? Probably not, but arriving from India to Addis Ababa, these were exactly our first impressions. As Ethiopia was the first country in Africa, we had kind of respect and did not know what to expect. In general we were positively surprised.

Addis Ababa is located 2350m above sea level and offers a comfortable climate with about 20 degrees, fresh nights, low humidity, lots of sunshine and little rain. The roads are mainly wide and crowded only in the center, not littered, drivers do not use the horn and the streets have charming names like “Bob Marley Square” or “Haile Gebrselassie Road”. Actually there is nothing really spectacular about the town. There are some communist architectural relicts, a green river valley and many inhabitants live in rusty Quonset huts. However, poverty does not seem as dire as in India because people care for their homes and the constructions offer much more privacy. But Ethiopia’s capital city also hosts what is proudly presented as the biggest market in Africa: the huge “Mercato” area, where you can find all sorts of fruits, traditional cheese, recycled steel, chickens dead or alive, clothes and the typical fascinating market atmosphere.

Compared to India, people appear to be much more into socializing. At one main public square, dozens of football players come together, have training sessions including warm-up, stretching and work out while others circle this square jogging. They are ready to smile, polite and like to do something with their friends. The “khat session” are very popular. People come together all day, sit and talk, chew the green leaves, play cards, eat peanuts and smoke shisha. Our couchsurfing host Kume was so friendly to take us to such a session with his friends.

Further, we made lots of good experiences. Small children raised their arms and at the last second we realized they were not begging but just wanted to shake hands. In a restaurant, the waitress was super friendly and interested and recommended a cheaper meal. We had nice conversations with people on the streets, being surprised how well informed they were, and later they showed us the way to the next minibus station. When Steffen took a picture of a group of small boys playing table-football, he was prepared to face demands for money, but all they demanded was a game against us. And after getting lost one day, one nice man accompanied us half an hour through the city to show us the way, and we could hardly prevent him from paying the bus for us.

We felt very comfortable and confident in Addis and that turned out to be a problem. Here, for the first time so far, we really got screwed. We were not conscious enough and applied our concepts, stereotypes and rules of thumbs from India to Ethiopia. Nevertheless, we must admit that the two betrayers did an impressively great job and played a perfect scam. First, they did not start the conversation on the streets, but instead they followed us into the office of Ethiopian Airlines where we had to book a domestic flight to Lalibela. While we got the token, they overtook us and therefore seemed to be waiting there as well. Then we “discovered” that we would fly on the same date and they offered to invite us to their families once we would arrive there. We went together to “Mercato” where they wanted to help us buying a sim-card (which really is a problem here). They were very educated, spoke an excellent English, knew couchsurfing and were great guides. We talked a lot about many different topics and again they were well informed and appeared to be trustful. When finally we had found a sim-card, they said we had to wait a bit for the forms, so we went into a bar nearby. Honestly, we enjoyed the time there, but when the bill came, they told us they had not enough money with them. They assured us to give it back on the flight to Lalibela. We were suspicious but it took us still some time to change our picture of them, so we paid the bill. Afterwards we realized all the small details that did not fit to the story, but it was too late and we had made a financial loss of 10 € per person. But worse was the feeling of being screwed and defeated by these two intelligent guys. The point is that such a story could be reality in Ethiopia (see the experiences above) and that they enriched the plot with many details to enhance credibility. In other countries, well-educated persons were not in need of cheating on us, and with people approximately like them we had made our best experiences. For comparison, Indian betrayers would never spend a whole afternoon with you before trying to make money out of it. But here obviously things are different.

Fortunately, when we started suspecting we also had a trick. We stopped talking about the flight on Sunday and several times mentioned a flight on Monday. After a while they did the same, so we were pretty sure they were liars. Probably this prevented us from loosing more money or worse things. They still wanted to go out to some bars and clubs but we strictly refused. They were getting angry and disappointed because they had more plans, and eventually they left. So we realized maybe it was not a clear defeat and perhaps a fair draw. At the end you have to take it in a sporting sense and anyway being upset about it won’t make it undone.

Definitely we have learnt our lesson and will be more cautious in the future, although this may be unfair to some sincere persons.