Ethiopian "Hats" and Portuguese Karaoke

We ate at a very good, very authentic Ethiopian restaurant last night - the decor was straight out of an Ethiopian village.  You can see some of it in the photos below.

Walking in the door, I was smacked with a delicious thick smell that made me think of rich, slowly barbecued beef.  We were ushered into our own little thatched hut where there was more than enough seating for the 14 of us - our team along with the Accenture team from the Global Fund and some of their non-Accenture colleagues from Africa, including Tanzania and Uganda.  It originally was supposed to be 13 people, but one couldn't make it.  After the restaurant informed us that we'd have to pay $30 for the no-show, one of the Global Fund guys called some friends who were happy to help us meet our quota.

The chairs / benches had cow skins draped over them and were arranged around a series of wicker tables that looked like giant weaved baskets turned upside down.  On the tables where giant weaved hats that look like they came out of southeast Asia, so of course we put them on.

Turns out they were the lids to the platters on which the food was served.  Our waiter was not amused and promptly moved the hats to outside our hut where we couldn't play with them.  You can see some of the decor in the following picture of Harinder - one of the consultants on my team - standing there doing something of unidentified nature.

The food was awesome - if you've never had Ethiopian, it's basically a bunch of heavily-spiced, stewed meats and vegetables served on a giant communal platter lined with pieces of this really spongy, flat bread that is like a giant crepe and serves as the only eating utensil  - but we had some drink issues.  The first drink was a Heineken that reeked of sulfur (I didn't even want to figure out the contaminant / source) and the second was a glass of wine from a bottle that had clearly been open for a couple of days.  Wishing to avoid saliva being added to the ingredients in our dinner, we decided to just order bottles of wine, which turned out to be really good.

Afterwards we stumbled into a Portuguese karaoke bar and proceeded to interrupt the Portuguese programming with selected American staples, e.g. Oops I Did it Again, Country Road, etc.  The crowd seemed to enjoy it much more than I would've thought, but I think it was mainly a laughing at us vs. with us situation.

Ironically, the bar had a version of Photo Hunt, but all of the images were cartoons, unlike the Naked Photo Hunt found in every sports bar in the US.  I figured Europe would for sure have something more scandalous, but nobody had even heard of it.