Our Home for the Week
I remember attempting to stay in a hotel in Niagara Falls with my parents. After seeing the second cockroach, Mom decided it was time to leave and we found another place to stay. After hearing people’s description of the hotel we where we were staying in Addis, I was anticipating said Niagara Falls hotel that we didn’t stay in to be a step up.
It wasn’t.
The Union Hotel Apartment is a very nice facility. It’s no Hilton. But it doesn’t pretend to be, either. It’s probably on par with Motel 6. Of course, there were a few drawbacks. Like the bed. While HUGE, it was basically just the box springs. So it was rather firm. But sleeping on top of a few comforters certainly helped in the comfort department.
Our shower didn’t have a curtain. So you either had to take a bath or do whatever you could to try not to get water all over the place. Fortunately, there was a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor. Water would eventually find its way down the drain. The yellow container hanging from the wall on the left-hand side of the picture is the water heater. They asked that when we weren’t using the water heater that we unplug it to prevent frying the system. Unfortunately, when we unplugged it the Wednesday before we flew home, the entire outlet came out of the wall. No more hot water for us.
The room also included a spare bed. This wound up being quite useful when one of us was sick and didn’t feel right sleeping close to Mihret. An added bonus to the extra bed: it did have a mattress and was very, very soft. It might have been too soft. Yes, we felt kinda like Goldilocks with the beds being too firm and too soft. Never really found one that was just right though. But that’s more than fine. It’s much better than sleeping on the Therm-a-Rest on a rocky ground!
Although we knew Mihret wouldn’t sleep in the spare bed, we still had to decorate it for her in anticipation of her arrival. One of the first toys she really latched on to was the elephant blanket. Not for something to hug, but as a tool to play Peek-a-Boo. She loves Peek-a-Boo!
Oh yeah – did I mention that Addis is at an elevation of approximately 7600 feet at its lowest point? I didn’t really notice that until I climbed the steps to our room for the first time. We were on the third floor and I could definitely tell we were at a higher elevation. All of us in our travel group could because we were sucking wind by the time we reached our rooms.
Here’s the view from our third-floor hotel room/apartment…
The hotel staff was amazing! What the facility lacked in amenities, it certainly made up for it in their hospitality. They loved playing with everyone’s kids and some of the ladies even gave impromptu hair-care training sessions for the moms. They also hosted a coffee ceremony for us shortly before we left for the airport – but I’m getting ahead of myself. More about the coffee ceremonies later.
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Matt – Thank you so much for sharing your journey! I’ve been so anxious to read about it – and this really gives us an insight into “the little things.” LOL – like your cold showers!
Can’t wait to hear more – hope the settling in is going well…
Thanks for allowing me to share our story!
Things are going really well! Much better than I’d expected, really. Tomorrow’s the first doctor appointment. We’ll see how things are going after that.
I love reading this but it’s so hard to read when you put dark blue as a background or maybe it’s just me. Some of us aren’t as young as we would like to think.
I’m not sure what you mean, Jo. The text should be black on a white background. There should be blue sidebars, but that shouldn’t affect the text. I assume that’s not what you see?
I was curious about the hotel and what it was like. Christy explained a little to me the other day. The pics definitely help visually. You know what I was noticing? The pic at the top of a family of four that is no longer. You need a new header with all the fishes in the fishbowl (The entire Todd family)…lol. Just sayin 🙂
I know! I don’t have a good picture of the ToddFive yet. The header feature is kinda picky and if we’re all not at similar height it really looks funky. It’ll be interesting to see how we make that work.
OK I just re-read your comment and I just responded in a completely unrelated manner…
A fishbowl with five fishies would be really cool! You interested in designing it? 😉