Christmas

Hi all, just wanted to say Merry Christmas to you. Unfortunately my modem got fried from the constant power outages, a minimum of 3 a day. I won't get a new one until next week, fingers crossed. I want to say thank you to every one who has written comments to me about the blog. I'm happy that you like it and thrilled that you have taken the time to read and leave your special messages!

Special thanks to Lois and Natalie for actually following the blog and making me look good ( hint, hint to everyone else damn it!) smooches on the cheek for both of you.

It absolutely does not feel like Christmas here, there is hardly any decoration in the shops and very little Christmas music on the radio. Some stores have tried to decorate by putting up some haphazardly tossed tinsel and ribbons, but there's this feeling, like it was done by someone who doesn't give a hiney about the holiday. I have been playing Christmas songs on itunes in an effort to get my Christmas spirit aroused, but so far, no luck.
I mean today's Christmas eve, the only decoration in our house is the Santa hat that I tossed on Anthony's miniature Indonesian statue (it looks very wrong!). And there's no way we are going to buy a turkey here, it will cost an arm, two legs and my liver.

There is enough dust in the air to choke a donkey, and them suckers have big nostrils. If you think Sahara dust is bad in Barbados then come to Nigeria. Anthony and I were discussing getting surgical mask like Michael Jackson.

So here's to not wishing a Nigerian Christmas on anyone, I hope that you all enjoy your holiday and that you have a fantastic new year filled with all kinds of goodie goodness!!

You are Welcome! (to Nigeria) - Lessons I learned So Far

Sorry I missed the last couple of weeks, my Internet at home went down. I've been suffering from web withdrawal, of course you know I'm using borrowed US Govt property to write this one now. I can't keep disappointing my loyal followers, all two of them. (hint, hint damn it!!) I'll try to make sure I post every Wednesday.

So now we've left Amsterdam, about to board our KLM fight to Abuja, and you know the strangeness has started because unlike other airports, the security check is done before board the aeroplane instead of before you enter the departure lounge. Just before you go into the portable corridor to the plane is when they do the security check. There is where I learned my first lesson about the average Nigerians.

Most Nigerians do not like to line up in a single line and go orderly one by one, it's everyman for himself. They cut in front of you and think nothing of it. They don't feel any sense of wrongness about it either. If you are not filling a space then it is obviously free for anyone who can.

Once you hit corridor then the smell hits you, "the armpit aroma". It's like walking down a column of men on either side who haven't bathe for days.... with their hands in the air! The armpit aroma also permeated the aeroplane, though not as bad as the corridor. I think KLM tired to be mindful of their non-african passengers and had the plane fumigated every now and then.
The flight was long, the seat was uncomfortable, the food was passable and the people on the plane were talkative. At the end of the flight, I noticed a Nigerian man talking to one of the flight attendants, (I'm assuming he was Nigerian, he wore the clothing and had the accent), she came back later with some packages and he put them in a plastic bag that he had waiting, I finally realized that they were left over sandwiches when I saw the packaging. This was my second Lesson, Most Nigerians will ask for things that we wouldn't dream of doing or might consider inappropriate.

But if I though the corridor at the Amsterdam airport was bad, it was nothing, nothing compared to the one at The Abuja airport, not to mention the airport it self. Have you ever been in the vicinity of something that smelled so terrible that you tried to stop breathing?? Man I tried everything, I held my nose in the air, to the side, I stopped breathing, but of course you can't do that for too long. Finally I alternated between not breathing and taking one breath all the while we were surrounded by Nigerians on both sides and trying not to let them see that you think they smell like rancid, mouldy decay! (Ok that was a little strong, but you have to experience it)

I remember looking at Anthony trying to convey with my eyes what my nose was suffering, I knew he was suffering too.

The first thing the customs officer told Anthony was "You must get me a visa!" When he saw his US dip passport. Anthony laughed it off, and said "Man this is my first day here!" to which the customs officer replied , when he heard that it was our first time in Nigeria "You are welcome!". This is apparently a traditional greeting. Every where we went we heard the phrase "You are Welcome!" It's very weird to have some one say that to you when you haven't said thank you. You feel like saying, oops did I forget to thank you for something? But it is said with huge smiles and lots of warmth to all visitors. But all that led to my third lesson, It is very difficult to embarrass the average Nigerian.

It took us nearly 2 hours to claim our baggage, because when Nigerians travel, like all black people, they tend to bring home enough baggage to rival a superstar. We had an arm guard escort us to our temporary home, yes that big gun was quite intimidating, at least to me. The only place I've seen a gun like that was on television. Because we arrived at night it was difficult to see what the countryside was like. But the streets were wide and clean and Quite well made. The roads are a lot better than the ones in Barbados.


There was a lot to do and learn the first week, we had to get some basic food stuff so that meant a supermarket run. Our first time in the supermarket was an eye opener. We had been told to bring as much in terms of food stuff that we could bring but we thought it can't be that bad. We should have listened. For a couple bags of groceries we spent about $350 US. We came out of there shell shocked. We paid about $11 us for an anorexic looking chicken and about $23 For a head of broccoli. We thought we were going to make huge savings in this country, instead realized that our money will be evaporating like water in the nearby Sahara.


I have to talk about driving in Nigeria. But that requires a post of it's own! Sorry I couldn't add any pictures to this one but I will to the next one. All my photos are on my laptop and of course you are not allowed to plug any foreign objects into the embassy computers, they are not allowed to take it! he he.

So next week, Driving in Abuja or "Dear God you mean they really brought that license!!!"

Amsterdam

I cannot think of Amsterdam without thinking about water. My first impression from the plane was that it looked like a huge swamp, neatly plotted into precise squares. It was a shock to us that it was so cold when we got outside the airport. We really only had warm clothes with us. September was already time for winter wear in Amsterdam. We were so exhausted that all we did was sleep for the first day, but the next day we were determined to make the most of it.

We got maps and set out to see the city in the warmest clothes we had. Luckily I had a jacket that I had decided not to ship but to carry with me. Thank god for my dislike of air conditioning!

Amsterdam is lovely, there are a ton of cute little bridges and lots of canals. Everywhere you looked there are people on bicycles.


It was strange to see men and women dressed for work in their nice clothes riding bicycles. In Barbados no one would be caught dead in a suit on a bicycle!
And the bicycles were something else to see! There were a lot of modified bikes, modified to carry things, I saw one guy with the front of his bike made into a carriage with 2 seats, two kids were strapped inside, just out for a ride with dad. I think the bicycles outnumbered the cars.

I was eager to see pot shops (called coffee shops there) and prostitutes, after all this was the place where sex and drugs are jail free. I imagined pot shops to be dark, mysterious and moral freeing, I found them to be noxious smelling and dark and forbidding. We never actually went into any, just stood outside and peeped in surreptitiously. The owners peered back at you with mixed looks of disdain and welcome, like they know something about you, know your secrets. Come in and get wasted, waste your life, I know that what you came here for, I’ve got freedom rolled up in in a spliff, their faces seem to say.

On the streets there were so many dreads, Caucasians with dread locks, badges of belonging, an allowance pass to all the pot you can smoke. I’ve got locks, I’m dedicated so I can smoke all I want and it’s religion. That’s what their hair say. You know because of the looks the give you, because your skin is black and you’ve got dreads too, so there’s guilt mixed with defiance when they look at you. Hey! I don’t owe you an explanations man! Thats what I thought, or maybe I just imagined it all.

So then it was on to a spot of whore ogling! But if I though the pot shops failed my expectations then the displayed prostitutes were even worst. I saw them and I don't know what I was expecting to see, but to me they looked sad, so very sad. They sat on stools or stood staring out the glass cases. They looked to me Like science exhibits of a life gone wrong. Their bodies so scantily clad, spoke volumes about their lives. Some of them had shriveled stomachs, a testament to the child that the had some where.
I’ve seen pictures of this street on TV, of beautiful, slim, curvy women who look at you with sex in their eyes. The women in those glass cases barely meet your eyes and the ones who did had looks of shame, defeat and hope mingling together. Some of them looked away, I think they were the ones who knew we were just peeping into their lives with no intention of crossing the threshold.

What I didn’t expect was that they looked like ordinary women I might know. Ordinary faces with a little too much make-up. A few remember that they were suppose to be enticing us and called out half-hearted stopping when they realize that we were not looking. I felt ashamed. In my mind I compared the fabric of my life to theirs found them wanting and myself lacking at the same time because I could do nothing about their situation and I knew I didn't want to get involved. Silly perhaps to feel that way, but I did.

There was still fun things to do, like Madame Tousante's museum, a ripe opportunity to hobnob with stars without their knowledge, lol.
And the Sex museum! That was amazing! lol At the beginning of the exhibit there is a flasher that jumps you out of your skin and then he flashes you of course! lol. There was all sorts of memorabilia, sculptures and pictures. Very interesting, not for prudes!

We walked all over Amsterdam, it's a very interesting city, so much to see, the buildings are beautiful. We had to be so careful with our money because the euro was high. The diversity of people was amazing. I saw a guy who looked just like Ralph Fiennes in The avengers - top hat, walking stick and all! I wish I could have taken a picture of him. I think there were people from all over the world there.

We were sorry to leave Amsterdam, it would have been nice to explore it more thoroughly. The airport was a bit confusing, but then I find most airports in big cities confusing! lol. A lot of people told me that I would know when I was in the right section of the airport, I would smell the difference they said, but they were wrong, it was on the plane...

Next week Nigeria or What is that smell!!

Texas - Bubbas and Pick-up Trucks

In Texas we stayed with my husband’s sister and her husband. They have a very nice house in a place called the Woodlands. The Woodlands is a quite beautiful place, lush trees line every street so that you feel like you are driving down a lonely country road no matter which avenue it is. It’s the dumbest idea ever.

You can never find what you are looking for because every street looks the same, plus the trees are hiding EVERY building! To continue with this Eco-friendly trend, businesses in the Woodlands area are not allowed to mar the landscape with gaudy, in-your-face signs. The signs are discreetly placed among the foliage. Oh-my-god, the ideas just kept getting better and better.

But despite all that, it’s a very pleasing to the eye so I guess they achieved their objective. Perhaps we are so in tuned with the billboards and the flashing lights that quite nature can no longer please us, I don't know.

For us, Texas was all about the shopping, we had a lot of stuff to buy for our 2 year stint in Nigeria. My sister-in-Law was really great, she took us everywhere and helped us to make sensible decisions. If it were left to me I would have just shopped at Barnes & Noble and Borders! In fact we finally did get to go there (it was not a priority) and Lisa said to me, you are the first person I've every seen using a shopping cart in a bookstore. Well we all have the things that are important to us.

My husband's Sister is a very neat person. Oh boy did we have fun there. We were cleaner than we ever have been. We are not untidy people, but we are not the tidiest either, we have a comfortable degree of living-in-ness, lol. But surprisingly she did pretty OK with us, she had her rules and it was only fair. She is a generous person with a big heart, (She even called around at hair salons and asked if they did hair locking. They though she was speaking a foreign language but it was a very thoughtful thing to do) So I did great for In-laws!

I got stared at a lot in Texas. I think I was the only black person in the Woodlands. My husband said to me, now you know how I felt in Barbados. He doesn't know what he's talking about, there are tons of white people in Barbados, why if you go to a car rally you'll see them all!

The few black people I saw nodded to me as if to say "struggle on sista!" I think some of them when the saw I was with my husband gave me a look that said "what the hell are you doing?! Can't you see they already out number us??(or something like that)"

We went to a place called a Mongolian grill, it's a cool idea. You get a bowl and select all the things you want and they stir-fry right there for you. So each customer has a unique dish. You can mix seafood with red meats or you could just have vegetarian stuff. But you know what I found, I found out where all the most overweight people in America are. They are at the Mongolian grill, with bowls piled sky-high. And boy did they stare at me. I thought it was funny. They were more of a spectacle that I.

We also went to an restaurant called Cracker Barrel. Man that was deep Texas country. There all kinds of pick-up trucks outside. The building was done in an old style with a huge veranda (porch for Americans) and lots of white rocking chairs outside. We went to get a table and discovered that it was jam packed inside. It was about 10:30 in the morning, don't these people work? We had to wait until a table was free. We finally got seated and I saw the crowd and smiled to myself. It was as typical as I expected Texans to be, there were cowboys, without the hats, granddaddy types with huge stomachs and suspenders and guys who's names could only be Bubba!. And the menu! I just knew that I had to have grits! It's exactly as the name describes, a gritty cereal. There were also biscuits and gravy (the gravy looked like white cement, I did not have any).

Texas was far quieter than I thought it would be, I guess that had more to do with the area we were in than Texas itself. It has a slow pace of life, so slow in fact that the people operated on a different time zone than the rest of the world, they speak slowly and do every thing slowly, it made Anthony's blood boil. There were so many foul-ups, mix-ups and blunders that Anthony said, my god I now understand why the president is so stupid! (Bush is a Texas man)

Well we finally left Texas, we were there for a month, did not get to go to a hoe-down, I kept asking my sister-in-law but she couldn't help me, they were from Florida originally.

So next on the list is Amsterdam - land of pot and prostitutes!

Rewind

So, Since I was suppose to have started this blog along time ago, I now have to rewind to the beginning of the trip. My first blog would have been entitled "African Hairdressing in Virginia or You'd better go to Washington child".

Now it may see a little trivial to talk about hair for my first blog, but maybe you might change your mind after I'm done, if you don't then the truth is I really don't care. So there!

I had the brilliant idea of locking my hair simply because I was tired of doing it myself and I was looking for an easier way to mange it. For anyone who does not have kinky hair, you have no idea how time consuming it can be to get it done. The washing, then the drying and finally the platting, weaving or braiding. This can take HOURS! And I did it all myself mostly because I had lost faith in hairdressers, but I found a hairdresser who was recommended to me by a friend who had locks herself, very lovely locks too.

I feet awkward at hairdressing salons, always have. The women chatter and I usually had nothing to add, plus I was a bit of a nerd, so what they talk about is of little, or no consequence to me. I was also reminded a bit of high school, you know what I'm talking about. High schools are always divided into cliques, the pretty dumb girls, the smart ugly girls, and the girls who don't fit into either group. I think I was in between, I was not dumb but I was not exactly Einstein either.
Hairdressers always remind me of dumb pretty girls from high school with their short skirts and perfect hair and perfect nails. So I hate salons because for some reason they always take me back to high school. I guess I never realized that before.

But I went. And discovered that my hairdresser was someone I had known growing up, now I know you are thinking that must have made it easier right? Hell no! It made it worse! Having someone with their hands in your hair is a very intimate thing, It was uncomfortable to have that kind of intimacy with a stranger, a familiar stranger, for that's what she was.
So I grudgingly went every 2 weeks for 4 months. When we left Barbados for the US, I though, I could continue this anywhere right? I mean, black people live everywhere and where there are black people there are hair salons.

The area in Virginia where we stayed was multiracial, but I could count on my hand the number of black people I saw. By multiracial I mean there were Vietnamese Americas, Latin Americans and Asian Americans. I remember walking all around the place looking for a hair salon, now I wasn't desperate yet, it was just a precaution. By the time I was desperate I thought I had found a place that I thought catered to black hair. I was happy to discover that it was in fact in walking distance and happily took off to become a walk-in.

I had my first taste of apprehension when I looked inside before I even got to the door (there were a lot of glass windows) I only saw some Latina chicks inside, they looked like hairdressers not customers. But I had come this far so I open the door and went in. The looked at me as if to say "where are you going? Don't you know you are in the wrong place?" I asked if they did hair locking. They answered me in Spanish. Immediately what little hope I had was crumbled. determined to get at least something out of this trip I decided to enquire if they knew where I could find a salon that would fix hair for someone like me. We managed to communicate in broken english and the answer was of course no.

I had to take a train to Washington DC to get my hair done. And even there there was only one person in the salon who did locks, a woman from Senegal. She told me my locks needed tidying up and she went to town with a scissors. When she was done I though it was lovely. She convinced me to buy these sprays to moisturize and shine my renewed locks. Later I discovered that they in fact made me break out in a rash, I should have known. Plus she had trimmed a little too closely, about 3 or 4 of my locks fell off!!! I now had patches! Patches!

So once again I have take matters into my own hands, the locks are gone and now my hair is braided because that is one thing that they can't #$%#$-up right? lol

Well I 'd better end it here and now, that was quite a lot to say for a first time. Next week or maybe tomorrow, "Texas or Bubbas & Pick-ups"