I, Person. You, Sheep.

Yesterday I went to Borders to see if they had an Amharic phrasebook (the national language of Ethiopia). I was pretty skeptical; how many people in the La Habra area would be interested in learning Amharic? I became a bit more hopeful when I saw their selection; besides having phrasebooks in languages I would expect, like French, German, and Spanish, they had books on Farsi, Indonesian, Gaelic, and other (what I would consider) more obscure languages. There was nothing under "A," but many of the phrasebooks were out of alphabetical order. (Maybe they were placed in the order of each language's respective alphabet.) After a bit of searching, I found a small Amharic phrasebook tucked away in the Mandarin section. Success!

I took it home and started thumbing through it right away. The first words I learned were "inay" ("I"), "akal" ("person"), "ante" or "anchee" ("you"), and "beug" ("sheep"). Later in the day I learned "Seulam" ("Peace," a greeting, much like "Shalom"; Hebrew and Amharic are even related languages), "Yikerta" ("Excuse me"), "Seme Jack no" ("My name is Jack"), and, probably most importantly, "Bunna yimtaleny" ("I'll have coffee"). Ethiopia is known as the birthplace of coffee and grows some of the world's best, so I'm really looking forward to spending time in a coffee house ("bunna bet"), hopefully meeting and making friends with some of the people in Addis.

I leave one week from tomorrow. It's coming quickly. I figure that I have just enough time to study this phrasebook to be dangerous. There's nothing like accidentally insulting someone in their heart language...

~Jack