So, this story actually happened over a month ago now in Bahir Dar in Ethiopia. I probably won’t do it justice, or make it seem anywhere near as funny as it actually was (Tom actually wrote a song about the whole night which I will try and upload once I get better internet). Also, (mainly for mum), before you read it keep in mind that these were just Ethiopians trying to scam us because we were Western (and therefore rich) and nothing bad actually happened.
The night started out pretty uneventful – we watched/drowned our sorrows for the England game at a fancy hotel in town (we actually won the game but the quality of football was appalling), half watched the Australia game and enjoyed the expensive vodka (45 birr a glass, about 2.25, which is expensive compared to a 6 birr beer!) at the nice hotel and then a couple of us (me, Alice, Niall, Kiwi, Tom, Phil and Keith) headed to a local bar/club. We danced and drunk more nice vodka and people started heading home until there was only me, Tom, Alice and Keith left. We decided to call it a night and Tom and I left the club just ahead of Alice and Keith. After we got halfway down the road we looked back to find Alice and Keith surrounded by Ethiopians arguing and pushing them. We went back to investigate and turns out they were accusing us of breaking one of the mirrors which were all along one side of the dancefloor. Now we were drunk but all confident we didn’t break the mirror, we made them take us back into the club to show us and the mirror had obviously been broken for a while. The argument in the street continued and was getting more heated as we were getting pushed and shoved around, we weren’t paying for something we hadn’t done so we decided to just walk away. We walked to the next bar and decided to hide out in there for a bit whilst things were calming down, they were playing Mysterious Girl so I was obviously quite happy on the dancefloor there until the door flung open and this guy grabbed Alice and dragged her outside, we followed them out and the argument was still going on, worse this guy was still holding onto Alice (although I think she was alright – “if you touch me again, I’ll fucking kill you” or something along those lines was what came out of her mouth), the ‘owner’ of the club (we never actually found out if he was the owner or not), obviously realizing that we weren’t going to pay threatened to get the police involved. I think he did this to scare us into paying but it backfired on him as we were like “alright then, take us to the cop shop”. We were bundled into a mini van, and Alice dragged the guy who was accusing us as well (“get in the back with the dirty criminals where you belong”), then two guys with rifles hopped in the front. This was the only point in the night when I actually was thinking what the hell are we doing, we should just pay the money and be done with it. A two minute ride later and we were at the police station, the police (of course) were asleep so the guys woke them up. We then proceeded to spend about an hour in the police station trying to explain the story to two cops who clearly didn’t care and just wanted to go back to sleep and this guy who was apparently ‘on our side’ and just ‘wanted us to have a good impression of Ethiopians’ (well yeah, maybe we would if you didn’t just try and get money out of us because we were Western) who was doing most of the talking/translating. Highlights included Toms ‘aggressive’ hand movements which Alice had to restrain, them asking us for ID (Alice and I handed in our photocopies of our passports, Tom decided to hand in his fake student card), the cops only listening to the boys (even though Alice and I were making infinitely more sense) and Tom saying “we are but humble travelers” in a sentence which just made us all piss ourselves. Meanwhile there were at least 5 guys having an argument outside which wasn’t helping the matter. Eventually after much futile arguing the translator guy decides that he will just pay on our behalf (“let him pay!” said Tom which the guy heard and got very offended about so Tom actually got down on one knee to apologise which), we all had to thank him, he paid the guy and we were allowed to leave. As we were walking out we saw the guy handing the money back to the translator (which just proved that the whole thing was just a stupid setup to try and get money from us). We ran home and then proceeded to draw all over the side of the truck so we wouldn’t forget it all in the morning, highlights of that included “Tom broke the mirror, nor did Keith or Alices or Tom”, “Karl and Mandy rock”, “Alices are awesome”, “Karl heart we” (I can’t really recall what that one was about”, “Unbreakers” and “we are innocent” it also involved a great picture (including disco ball) showing us not breaking the mirror which was so good it could basically be used as evidence.
Oh and about 3 weeks later, Kiwi said she might have broken the mirror.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment