New Year's Eve isn't one of my favorite holidays. It's amateur night, full of idiots carousing to vomit- inducement just to collect stories of blacked-out hookups. But I had high hopes for New Year's 2007, celebrating with strangers in Addis Ababa.

Maggie washes her hand with a pitcher

Ilya, Antonio and me

Yum! Habesha Restaurant does traditional cuisine justice.

Antonio continues to freak out the waitress.

Amazing dancers made great entertainment.

The African road-trip crew.

Nina happily takes a glass, not knowing how bad it tasted.

I'd first encountered Maggie and Nina playing Scrabble with my friends Anshal and Raj at the Axum airport; fully absorbed in the game, our greetings were rather brief.

But when we all ended up in Taitu Hotel a couple days later, we exchanged friendly smiles of recognition. After my hectic afternoon of jewelry shopping and avoiding Silesh's demands for his SIM card, I came back to Taitu without plans for New Year's Eve. I'd spoken briefly to Sem but it didn't sound promising. As I headed down the steps, Maggie called out to me.

Relieved, I plopped down with the girls and met their new German acquaintance. We decided to have dinner at Habesha Restaurant, our final meal of traditional Ethiopian cuisine. Canadian Maggie and English Nina, lawyers working in Tanzania on the Rwandan war crimes tribunal, wanted to ring in the New Year at a jazz bar called Harlem.

Rob, an Aussie traversing Africa by motorbike, approached with that easy friendliness that as a solo traveler, I'd often wished came to me as naturally. He'd begun in Spain and crossed to Morocco, and was planning to depart Africa via the Middle East, continuing through Asia until he was a ferry's distance from home. He'd joined up with Spanish couple Ana and Antonio and Dutch couple Ilvy and Ilja, who'd all met driving separately north through the continent. We collected a couple young guys and couple old—really old—guys and were soon hurtling down Bole Road in three separate taxis to Habesha Restaurant.

Habesha of course, means "Ethiopian" in Amharic. The restaurant was appropriately kitted out in traditional décor and breathtakingly beautiful waitresses in locally-produced white cotton dresses. Due to the crowds on this festive evening and our 13-strong group, we were forced to take a table outside. Alcohol became our source of warmth.

Most of us had just met, so we ordered individually and ended up with more large pans of injera than each low table should hold. My choice of zilzil tibs was tender and flavorful, and the injera was the best I'd had in the country: soft instead of spongy, lightly sour without being mouth-puckering and not a hint of dampness.

The evening was awash in beer and the fermented honey wine tej. The drunker we got, the more pictures we took mugging wildly with each other and the cheerfully unflappable waitresses. After more drinks than I could count and more food than anyone needed, our bill came to 100 birr each—about $11 for a thoroughly successful New Year's Eve celebration.

As we gathered our things—most arduous for me and the German, weighed down with luggage in order to go directly to the airport—the pretty waitresses expressed shock at our departure. They begged us to stay, finding us space inside and cajoling other customers to watch our bags.

Now we had an unobstructed view of the dancers, skilled on a vastly higher level than I'd previously seen. Two women and one man alternately sang and danced along with an energetic band. When it came time for the solos, the preciseness of the shuddering shoulders now combined with leaping down the dance floor, gyrating hips and the quick yet fluid neck snaps had all our jaws agape. The male soloist was the most impressive, with ballet-high jumps and full-body convulsions.

Antonio and Rob both took a turn with good humor, amusing the audience comprised only of locals. Perhaps most impressive was that almost all Ethiopians could perform to some level, as a few random audience members joined in and did much better than any of us did.

Our buddies the waitresses appeared at midnight with sparklers and a nasty white wine in plastic glasses. Shrieking delightedly, everyone in the restaurant celebrated Western New Year with us—the only Westerners in the house.

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