The spirit of Meles Zenawi brought Addis to a halt last Saturday. Despite having died in slightly mysterious circumstances in Europe on 20th August 2012, the previous and extremely popular Prime Minister’s face is still seen on billboards and electronic displays around the city. This being the fifth anniversary of his death he became even more prominent recently, culminating in the annual “Tour Meles Zenawi for Green Development” cycling race across the country, attracting around 100 cyclists.

The final 114 km stage was in Addis on Saturday. Unannounced, no diversion warnings, no prior notice, the city simply ground to a halt. One missionary friend and colleague popped out for some bread that morning and returned with it three hours later. Incidentally the winner of the race was Willie Smit of South Africa.

So one of the more sensible decisions Chris and I have made since being here was to go shopping on Friday instead of Saturday, because on Wednesday it was announced that Friday would be a public holiday. Suddenly all the plans I had made for Friday – Amharic tuition, patient appointments, training for becoming a member of the Bingham Academy board of governors – had to be cancelled or rearranged. Hence on Friday – Eid al-Adha – we decided to shop.

Eid-al-Adha is, according to Wikipedia, “the second of two Muslim holidays celebrated worldwide each year, and considered the holier of the two.” Eid-al-Fitr is the final day of the Ramadan fast; Eid-al-Adha (“Feast of the sacrifice”) “honours Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God’s command” (see Genesis 22), although Muslims dispute which son Abraham was asked to sacrifice and will usually insist it was Ishmael, not Isaac. The result of this holiday was that the roads were quieter than normal although fortunately all the shops we needed (some run by Muslims) were open.

A shopping trip can be a prolonged affair. We are in the grip of the rainy season, and this has a rather negative effect on the road surface, especially as few repairs were done in the last dry season. Roads often turn to rivers after a heavy downpour, and wash away all the local people’s valiant attempts at temporary repairs. Our wonderful Ford 4x4 pickup bounces over all the damage, but even with such a competent vehicle certain routes are becoming impassable, and Haile now takes me a different way to my clinic each day to avoid the worst of the potholes.

We can never be sure that what we need will be in a certain supermarket, so visiting three or four is not unusual. Then there is the baker, and then the “Veggie Man”. The “Veggie Man” has a small “souk” that for some reason attracts ex-pats, and he has become one of our favourite stops. Always cheerful, usually well-supplied, he greets us with enthusiasm and attempts to make us speak Amharic. This time we stocked up on oranges, potatoes, mangoes, bananas, some green vegetables, apples, “lomi” (a cross between a lemon and a lime) and a butternut squash. After paying and tipping the guy who carries it all to our vehicle, we head off towards home along a remarkably damaged road, although this time there is one more stop needed. I need some scratch cards to top up my mobile phone so I can buy 4GB of data for a month of Internet. I shall need 600 Birr’s worth, and “Save More” supermarket often has high denomination cards.

The guard ushers us into one of the few parking spaces in front of the shop, and as soon as we go in we realise there is a problem. There’s no electricity. Of course, this shouldn’t be too big a problem, but in Ethiopia there are laws about receipts – both the seller and the purchaser break the law if a receipt isn’t issued and received. Which explains the signs on the wall (“Do not pay without a receipt!”) and the huddle around one of the two checkout tills. The checkout attendant is taking people’s items, yelling at someone in the bowels of the shop who yells back the price, and she is then writing it all down on a pad of receipts. We go into the shop and find a few things we could need, then we join the melee around the tills. After a few minutes the power comes on (a generator I suspect) and the tills light up. I carefully watch what is going on at the second till as a shop worker has taken my basket to it, expecting the bar code reader to start up any minute. But no. The tills are really Microsoft Windows terminals, and are rebooting. Several times. The till girl types in her password. And again. And again. Four times I think. Meanwhile behind me the price yelling and hand writing continues. It takes an age. Eventually the till starts to work and our girl starts scanning our items. I ask her if there are mobile cards available. Yes, she says. 25 Birr only. Oh. That would mean 24 cards to scratch and 24 multi-digit codes to carefully type into my phone. I feel my evening slipping away from me into a pile of used scratch cards. Resignedly I buy four – just so I can at least top up both of our phones by 50 Birr each. The Internet will have to wait.

Our journey back to Bingham was as uneventful as any journey involving potholes, broken down vehicles, big rocks, the odd donkey and quite a lot of people can ever be.

Here’s a 4-minute video taken from my “dashcam” of our 17-minute journey home from the “Veggie Man” yesterday. It had just stopped raining. It’s New Year’s Day on Monday (another public holiday but much more predictable than the Eids) hence the huge chicken markets. See if you can spot them. Note the potholes, the broken road outside “Save More” about a quarter of the way through on the right, the chicken market under the ring road fly-over (sorry about the jerky slo-mo), and the sheep with a pink head on a motorbike. The video ends as we drive into the entrance to Bingham – a moment always accompanied by a whispered prayer of thanks that we are once again back home in one piece. (I removed the sound track – all it consists of are engine noises and Chris and me chatting to each other. I was going to put Mark Knopfler’s “Going Home” in as a backing track, but if I did YouTube would make me put adverts into the video.) You can watch this video on YouTube or full screen - it's available in full HD for the best view.