Friday, 25 April 2003
The morning began with lovely tones from distant Ethiopian-orthodox church. Soon the singing would be accompanied by the Muslim words while we had breakfast in Sophie’s garden.
The rain suddenly pouring down big time while we looked through all our digital photos. It looked like a foretaste of the weather in June and July. Jørgen called the Ethiopian Airlines to confirm our tickets yet another time, which turned out to be a very good move.
The Ethiopian Airlines had already received our confirmation twice; hence they judged that we didn’t want to attend. Luckily for us, they had some free seats and later that evening when boarding, we saw that several passengers didn’t attend the overbooked flight.
We said goodbye to Jørgen and thanked him for a very eventful and pleasant journey. Sophie was to join us till Frankfurt and continue to visit her family in Colorado, USA. She hadn’t been out of Africa in seven months and could use to talk about “real problems” like how many channels one need on the cable-TV as she mentioned with a smile. We got seated in the plane and hoped for a pleasant flight during the night, even though the captain announced that we had to stop over in Cairo to refuel.
Unfortunately they couldn’t keep the flight schedule. We were supposed to be in Copenhagen at the time when we said goodbye to Sophie in Frankfurt. Paradoxically we didn’t get any information about the delay in the plane, but some phone calls to Denmark by cell phone confirmed that we would not land in Copenhagen before 11 am approx. two hours late. Yet again we realized that Ethiopian Airlines works well when airborne, but plan by African time.
We arrived in rainy Denmark. We faced sullen Danes with “real problems” and were instantly missing the happy faces in Ethiopian and their: “Hello Mister!”