Dire Dawa

Today I flew from Addis to Dire Dawa, a large city in eastern Ethiopia. It's a more traditional looking city than the national capital, but the second most populous with some 260,000 people. Dire Dawa won an important place on the map when it became the bypass point for the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway, completed in 1915. Due to rising costs to run the railroad through Harar, Emperor Menelik decided to keep to the lowlands and, under these circumstances around 1902, Dire Dawa was established.
Upon arrival, Dereje took me to my hotel. It is a newly built hotel and rather stunning, and I was further impressed when I was shown to a corner room with a spherical far wall with large windows looking out over the town. A door on the far wall opened out onto a large veranda--I could imagine having a BBQ with a half-dozen close friends out there--with a view of the patio and pool in the rear of the hotel.
However, I didn't linger at the hotel for long. I quickly took a shower and headed out to meet some of my Ethiopian colleagues for dinner. We headed to the Tsehaye Hotel Restaurant first, but when the waiter told us that they didn't have half the dishes we ordered, we decided to move to another place instead. It was just as well because we headed over to the Paradiso, generally considered the best restaurant in town. There we ordered tagliatelle with tomato sauce and a spaghetti dish along with some national dishes like kitfo, tibs, and roasted goat meat on-the-bone, as well as a Russian salad and a couple of beers. I ordered a Harar Beer, which people had been recommending since I mentioned I was going to eastern Ethiopia, and it was an excellent brew indeed. It went great with the dishes of tangy, spicy salsa-like sauce that came complimentary along with a basket of fresh French bread which we dipped in the sauce.
After dinner, we headed over to another bar in town for a couple of Dashen beers (brewed in western Ethiopia near Bahir Dar, a place I was able to visit last March). We sat at an outdoor table next to the street, and as we chatted, a crowd of people was walking by. Apparently they were returning home after watching the football (i.e. soccer) game that was being shown on the huge projector screen at the train station down the road.