By the way, the Piazza has gone the way of so many American city centers. It’s shabby, with cheap stores and heavy sidewalk marketing. The fancy goldsmiths, including the legendary Teklu Desta, for those with long memories, are still there, but little else, with a conspicuous exception: Castelli’s, a restaurant in a converted ground floor apartment with its door ten meters downhill from the Piazza. Diners sit in what were obviously bedrooms, the salon, etc. It is the classiest and most expensive restaurant in Addis, the place where Bill Clinton dined recently, where Brad and Angelina go when they are in Addis adopting children. It may still be run by the same brother and sister who ran it in the 1960s…it was two years ago, when I was there last, dining across the room from the head of the African Union, two Members of Parliament and the Swedish Ambassador. Expensive is relative…$100 bought a lavish dinner then, including fine French wine.

The Bole area, on the way to the airport, and the Old Airport area, in the southwest, have most of the shops and classy restaurants now.