Tewodros Belay International Hotel

My wife and I were placed here by Ethiopian Airlines overnight due to a 12-hour gap between our arrival from Zanzibar and our departure to Windhoek. So, on the bright side, we did not have to buy US$50 visas, had a free shuttle to the property, a free dinner, and a free room...all thanks to an airline which recently won several annual awards as Africa's premier airline. Plus, I had always wanted to visit Ethiopia and thought this was a great way to "test drive" the capital. Sounds great, no? Before sounding like an entitled couple living in Europe, let me state that we are both the product of working class backgrounds and have stayed in many very cheap hotels all over the world. The shuttle left 40 minutes after it was full but, no worries, we arrived. The hotel is on a main street with no illumination and not within several hundred yards of any open businesses. They wanted to give my wife and I separate rooms but we told them that was not necessary. None of us on the bus could place our bags in our rooms because the man at the front desk told me that once the doors were shut, they could not be opened from outside. So we all headed off to the hotel restaurant for our free meal before going to our rooms. The hygienic conditions is the restaurant were very iffy, symbolized be chewing gum stuck on the sides of the napkin dispenser. There were two options as to food, kind of like on an airline flight. We asked if we could buy some bottled water but were told that was not possible. Actually, we used Google Translate to ask questions as no one at the hotel spoke more than 3 or 4 words of English. We headed up to our room. The sheets and pillow cases were very yellow, the one clothed chair stain all over, the bathroom had a giant round hole in the center, and no running water. For the first time ever, we decided to sleep in our clothes and not bathe the next day (if the water came on). There was also only a very sheets of toilet paper---I imagine this was a hint to hold it until we were back at the airport the next day. There was one small bottle of drinking water in the room. As we were not permitted to buy more at the restaurant, I asked if I could take bottle in the second room that had been assigned to my wife. I was told that was impossible with a stare that gave me the impression that doing so would find me overnighting in an Addis Ababa jail, possibly an upgrade over the Tewodros Belay! I later ventured down in the dark from our 3rd floor room to reception and found there was no one there and the doors to the outside locked. Considering they could not figure out how to get us into our rooms if we had closed the doors, it would have been ironic to die in a fire because they had figured out how to lock the doors to the street. The next morning we skipped the complimentary and awaiting the shuttle back to the airport. There were more passengers than seats and naturally arguments broke out. The driver ended up in tears but the out-of-con