27 September 2009: Lalibela—The Churches
Posted By Sika on June 15, 2010
We went back to the hotel so I could catch breakfast and to pick mom, who was feeling much better after more sleep. I had what seems to be the traditional Ethiopian breakfast: bread with creamed fresh honey in Hello Kitty-ish plates and coffee (ok, the Hello Kitty may not be traditional). I had decided I would drink lots of coffee in Ethiopia, just for Kris.
We went back out to the churches, catching a lift in one of the ubiquitous minibus taxis that always seem ridiculous when they’re full of all of two people.
Individually, the churches are very interesting. The artistry is impressive, and they remain solid and present enough that you’re always aware of how difficult it must have been to chip away what didn’t belong in order to make them.
But collectively they’re a little dull. The interesting bits are small—a fresco here, a priest who tries to look super cool while posing for his photo there—oh, yeah, and the mummies—and are interspersed with staring at rock; looking at the representations of whether the other criminals who were crucified with Christ went to heaven or hell; taking shoes off and putting them back on again; and waiting for the priest to pose with his cross, even if you don’t really care or want yet another picture of a priest and his cross.
Oh, and arguing with your guide whether a symbolic disembowelment by the light of Christ is really such a good thing. Put that on whichever side of the tally of pros and cons you’d like.
I hope that people who are filled with the love of Christ would enjoy it all more than I did, rather than having the sense of wonder quickly supplanted by boredom, a sense of needing to take pictures because, “I might want them later,” and trying to remember how many of Lalibela’s things to do we’ve checked off so far.
Of course, a lot of this was the beginning of the end for me. I was heading home, but too rapidly and too slowly at the same time. I had already been living out of my backpack for almost 2 months, and I still had another month to go. It was getting old, and I was getting tired. While I still found things to marvel at every day, this, right here in Lalibela, was the beginning of wishing I was home already. And even that sensation was odd: Except for immediately before my first big trip, I had never before in my life wished I could be traveling less.
Mom and I left Lalibela the next day to head back to Addis, where we stayed at Desalegn again, and found the rooms that had yet to be remodeled far less charming and far more bug infested than the rooms that had been remodeled. Early the next morning, mom headed home, and a few hours later, I headed to Uganda.
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