Lucy Cafe

After an hour or so spent at the National Museum, where the 3.2 million year old bones of Lucy lie in a display case (well, the actual bones are in the archives and a cast is presented in the case) laid out in the formation they were found, I headed over to the Lucy Cafe located next to the museum. The place is like a safe-haven against the urban chaos outside its gates. It is an outdoor restaurant with a parkland atmosphere, paths winding along a row of booths to the left when you walk in or straight ahead to a cluster of round, glass tables under canopy umbrellas. Uniformed servers brought me a menu and I see they have Bedele beer, one I hadn't tried yet. It was already past lunchtime, but I'd not yet eaten so I decided to get a medium chicken & avocado pizza, my grumbling stomach assuring me that I could finish it. The other restaurant patrons, judging from what I could tell, seemed to be from China, Europe and other African countries. Since I was not alone as a tourist in this setting, I unabashedly pulled out my travel guide and read through it as I sipped my beer in a glass goblet. I studied the maps for Addis Ababa and then read the sections on Lalibela and Mekele, two towns up north I have yet to visit. My pizza arrived; big slices of avocado, chunks of chicken, green peppers and bubbling mozzarella cheese and over the next 30 minutes or so I savored each and every slice. If Lucy was alive today, I'm sure she would be proud to have such a fine restaurant named in her honor, although, realistically, since she lived before the discovery of fire, she would probably have ordered something like raw lizard and a bowl of rainwater.