Today is not the 16th

After lunch today I ordered "boonah" (regular coffee) and spoke with one
of the course coordinators about the coffee ceremony last night. He
asked me what was special about yesterday and I told him the ceremony
was just to show those of us from overseas the tradition, but then I
asked him what days it is usually performed. He told me it is
traditionally held on the first of every month because that is the
birthday of Magdalene (which took me a minute to figure out was Mary
Magdalene). I think he said this day is pronounced "Hidada", although
the volume of the television in the cafeteria made it hard to hear him
clearly. The coffee ceremony is also performed on the 12th, 19th, 21st
and 23rd of the month (although I didn't catch the reason for all of
these), and when I said that was a lot of coffee at the end of the month
he replied, "Yes, but you just pick one of those". Then he reminded me
that the Ethiopian calendar has 12 months of 30 days (none of them have
28 or 31 days like our calendar) and today was not the 16th but the 9th,
so in 3 more days it would be the 12th (this Thursday) and I should ask
the guest house to do another boonah ceremony then.

p.s. He also corrected me that the popcorn snack eaten before the coffee
is pronounced "/ko-low/", not /koolah /like I wrote before.
p.p.s. Not having ready Internet access, I can not verify most of this
information on Wikipedia and the like, so if anyone wants to do some
fact checking, feel free to leave a comment with corrections :)