No Snow

Sorry about the break in posts, we haven't had internet connection for days,

But like the title says, there's no snow in Nigeria. Which is expected, of course. It is a tropical climate after all. But you know, whenever it becomes that Christmas time of year in America everyone thinks of snow and snow and snowpeople and all that snow stuff. And then they think of the Santa in the red suit (fun fact: the red suit Santa started when Coca-Cola put Santa in the iconic red suit and hat ensemble; before that, there was no red-wearing Santa! Commercialization man, commercialization.) But here, it's a little different. Even though on all the advertisements and everything with the Santa drinking a Coke bottle and all the snowfIlakes on the edges and all that, there's one small thing. There's no snow here even though snow fills the ads! Quirky, right? It kinda takes some getting used to when you see Christmas decorations up and there's dust from the Sahara blowing across the lawn and the sun is beating down like nobody's business. Maybe it's just me, I don't know. I'm not saying that it snowed every year in Durham, or anything like that. It's just...I can't really explain it...strange. That's the only word I can use for it. Yes, I'm strange.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Pidgin English Words

Okay, yesterday I had promised you guys something,

I would post on my blog a bunch of words from the language Pidgin English, so that you can learn a bit of a new language. So I'll show you interjections, full sentences, everything! Now, I can't take all the credit for this, I had a lot of help getting all this stuff together, so here it is.

A = A was derived from the English "I," and can is used in the same way. For example: A know no say. (I don't know that.) "Ai" is another version of A.

A-AH = A-Ah is derived from Yoruba, and it's a lot like "what in the world?!" It can be used in anger, shock, almost any sort of surprising situation, e.g. A-ah, (laughter), wetin be dis? (A-ah, what on Earth is this?)

BONES = Bones has nothing to do with the bones in your body. It's a derivative of English, and it means a pair of sunglasses. Hey, don't ask me how that came about. That's a weird one.

CROOMA = Crooma is derived from English, and it means a gullible, easily cheated person.

DABARU = A derivative of Yoruba, Dabaru means confusion, and disorganization. For example: Hey - make una no bring dat matter come dabaru dis meeting, o, ehen! (Listen, you guys don't introduce that matter at this meeting, got it?)

GAAN = Gaan is derived from Yoruba. It means precisely, without a doubt. For example, E vex am gaan. (It angered him/her a whole lot.)

IJEBU = Derived from Yoruba, Ijebu means non-authentic, a counterfeit. e.g. Dis na ijebu. (This is not authentic.)

That's all for now.

Signing off,
The Traveller

Language, Nigerian Style

How do you say, "how are you?"

Do you say, "what's up?" Well, however which way you say it, there's a language here in Nigeria called Pidgin English, and it's a language that's a mix of everything. This is how you'd say "how are you" in Pidgin English: "How you dey?" Pretty simple, right? Dey is like "is" and your current state and stuff, it's kinda a hard word to explain, but that's pretty much what it means. The rest is pretty much easy to decipher. Now how would you respond? You could do this in many ways, but one way is to say: "Body dey inside shirt." This is a way of saying, "hey, at least I'm still moving!" Pidgin English is almost like the middle language, one that you can speak in even if you only speak English and another person only speaks Yoruba, because the language has a mixture of a whole bunch of languages. For all you Lord of the Rings fans, it's the Common Tongue for Nigeria. In the Pirates of the Caribbean you'll even hear Jack Sparrow speak some Pidgin, crazy huh? Let me teach you a few words in Pidgin English. "Abi" means "right?" And if you are asking a question, you usually start it off with the word "Se," which is pronounced "Sheh." So "Se you get" means what? "You get it man?" is the English equivalent of "Se you get?" Seriously, this thing is complex, but I don't think that there's an official dictionary of it even though it's been around for hundreds of years. I don't speak it fluently, not even close, but I can understand a lot more than I can speak because it has many English words in it, so I can get the overall message of what someone's saying. Awesome, right? Maybe I'll make a list of words in Pidgin English with their English equals, and I'll post it here, so that all of us can learn something!

Signing off,
The Traveler

Insects in the Yard

We're about to go to a wedding so I have to cut this post pretty short,

But anyway, I just noticed that I've always talked about the animals or plants in the yard but never the bugs. I'm gonna fix that now. I've written enough about soldier ants in the past, so I'm not gonna mention them for now. What I'm focusing on right now are the mini-bees. They're bees, but super-duper small. Like really small like gnats. That's how small they are; they act like bees except they make their home in the door-frame for our back door instead of in trees. They don't make a real hive, cuz the outsides are brown and smooth, and there isn't any shape to them. And if you actually open the hive up, you'll find pretty sweet honey, but because the bees are so small you can get like a spoonful from each hive. And the bees sting, just like their bigger cousins. And they hurt! It's probably worse than a bigger bee's sting, because there are more of them, like hundreds. So it's pretty bad. And the crazy part is that they look like gnats, because they're small and black, so you'll be aggravating them and you'll have no idea what you're messing around with!

Signing off,
The Traveler

Oh Yeah

I switched back to the old template for a reason,

And this is why. The new dynamics view for Blogger doesn't allow small apps and stuff, so you're just stuck with Blogger's basic build. That really has to get rethought. It's a cool system and all, the dynamic views, but they're just not practical yet. I'll wait to they do become completely realistic.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Dust

It's everywhere,

It's on the floors, it's in the hallway, it's all over the air. An orange haze hovers around the town. Why? Well, all of this dust is coming from the Sahara, hundreds of miles away, and settling around here. Again, why? This always happens around Dry Season. Again, WHY? Well, here's my first theory: the dust is blowing over from the Sahara all the time, it's just that in the Rainy Season it gets washed away. My second theory is that maybe since you have the Dry Seasons and Rainy Seasons all over the continent (I think), then maybe the Sahara's dust only blows over in the Dry Season because that's when it's driest. This last theory doesn't make that much sense because deserts don't get much rainfall in the first place, even if it is Rainy Season. So then here's the next question. How does this dust travel from the Sahara all the way to here? It's possible, because I've heard of dust traveling to Florida and stuff from the same desert. And why does the Sahara produce so much dust in the first place? Is it a dust factory or something?

Signing off,
The Traveler

P.S. I think there might be monkeys in the Backyard Backyard.

Brownie's Species!

I think I've figured out what Brownie is!

Yes, of course we all know that she's a goat, but I think I know what type of goat she is. Brownie is..........................a Nigerian Dwarf Goat! Yes, a Nigerian Dwarf Goat. It's a type of goat which originates in West Africa, and it's supposed to be small and have a very mellow, even attitude. Like Brownie. Also, they're supposed to come in all different types of colors, and they can have spots, pretty much anything. Their colors can change over time, kinda like how Blackhorn Jr.'s turning from black to red. So I'm pretty much convinced that most Nigerian goats are Nigerian Dwarf Goats. Maybe that's why they're called Nigerian Dwarf Goats, because they live in Nigeria. :P I checked the Nigerian Dwarf Goat Association website and I think it's ironic that even though they're called Nigerian Dwarf Goats, banners that they have on the site are all red white and blue. Why is this? Well, I did a bit of background research and discovered that Nigerian Dwarf Goats were taken from West Africa in the early 1900s and brought to America for feed for zoos who needed meat for the tigers and such. Disgusting. I know. And then, after a while, they noticed that the goats were actually pretty gentle and kind so they thought, "hey, why don't we stop feeding them to the lions and keep them for milking?" So the Nigerian Dwarf Goat gained it's popularity in the States, that's why there were American flags all over the site. A short little history lesson that will probably never help with any history pop quiz. Well, at least you learned something today.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Looking for Fruit

Remember the last post I did, New Fruit?

I've been eating those things up like no one's business. And boy, now the tree's almost empty of the red cherries! So I went around the yard looking for more fruit to pluck. Guava's? Nope, not ripe yet. They're just small green things right now. Cashews? Nu-uh. Not even thinking about being ready to harvest. Mangoes? Not ready either. Bananas? Well, we had already gotten a few bunches of bananas a few days ago, and besides I can't climb up the trees and cut them down myself. Plantains? You can't eat plantains raw in the first place, so I move past that. Pineapples? I would have to hack them off their stalk-bush thingy. Last was almonds, and there were none that I could see that were ripe. Oh wait, I made a mistake; last was tangellos, and they weren't ripe either. Nothing is ready for my to just take down and eat. Eh, whatever. But I think the reason is because everything's dying right now. Since it's become dry season, almost all the grass in the lawn is yellow and crumbling, and leaves are falling like in Fall. And the heat in the daytime is so dry and...dry, it's completely energy sapping. And then in the nighttime it drops to like 60 degrees farenheit. That's like SUPER cold here. I shouldn't really be complaining; it's pretty chilly up in the States right now, but for Nigeria, that's like freezing snow kinda cold. I really wish I had some fruit....

Signing off,
The Traveler

New Fruit

Remember the list of fruits we had in the yard?

Well there was one that I had missed: it's a type of tropical cherry! It's small and red like a cherry, but that's where the similarity ends. It has this sort of ridge all along it, and there's a huge seed in the middle. It's juicy, and the juice can really stain your clothes. Like I care about that sort of stuff. Anyways, the taste is a little strange. It's like sweet, but peppery tasting afterwards. Yeah I'm not that good at describing stuff like that. It's unbelievably dry and hot and all the plants are dying. Whenever you walk these days the dead leaves on the ground crackle back at you. It's the time of year. We've been waiting for a package full of stuff to arrive here from the States but the shipping company that we used is horrid. It still boggles my mind that even though it's the middle of winter in Durham NC, our hometown, yet right here it's 100 degrees Fahrenheit!

Signing off,
The Traveler

Dubai and Abu Dhabi

Dubai.

Well, we arrived this morning! And man have I got a lot to tell you guys. I'm pretty much going to skip talking about the flight itself. It was at night so we couldn't see anything and all I did was watch Captain America and the Simpsons. All I'll tell you is about when 30 minutes before we landed, when the sun was rising up, I look down at the desert below. It looked like a sea, but we weren't anywhere near water. Isn't that crazy? It looked so flat from such a high altitude. It was really awesome. And then, as we see Dubai from above, I see the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa! Don't worry, I filmed some wicked footage of it, and that shall be posted later. But anyway. After we landed and got outta the airport, we began to drive our way to Abu Dhabi. Somebody had told us that the trip was short, like only 30 minutes. Well guess what? The trip between Dubai and Abu Dhabi is like 2 HOURS!!! And this is after a 6 hour plane trip. As you can tell, we weren't very happy about this. But wait, before I continue, let me explain a few things. For those of you people who are wondering, wait, I thought you guys were going to Dubai? Well, we were wrong. Dubai is the capital city of the UAE, and has the 7 star hotel and the tallest building in the world. Abu Dhabi is like that other one. It's a lot smaller, it's still getting developed and all, and it's pretty nice. The attention to detail in both cities is amazing. Everything is intricately carved and there are all of these wacky buildings, like one that leans and one that's top-heavy. One of the interesting things that I've noticed here is that the faces of the two princes and king of UAE is everywhere; in supermarkets, in camera stores, in malls, in KFCs. EVERYWHERE. Why? Well, it's kinda like law to have at least one picture of them if you have a public outlet or whatever. It's starting to get a little creepy, with their eyes following you wherever you go. It almost feels like your inside of 1984. But it is a monarchy and all, so I guess they have to enforce their rule somehow. :/. And things are so EXPENSIVE here! A paperback of I Am Number 4 is $14!!! Every product is at the least $10 more expensive than it should be. So my Dad isn't very happy. I'm not jumping for joy either. I had wanted to buy an XBox 360 wireless controller so I could play Shift 2 in style but it was like $50. It might actually be less expensive back in Nigeria! Before we went, all of these Nigerians had told us that it is cheaper to shop in Dubai than in Lagos, so we believed them. WE SHOULDN'T HAVE. But, anyway, I'll continue the story later.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Sorry about the video, that's gonna have to happen later.

The internet is not working. As usual. :/ It's too slow to upload a 24 megabyte file. THAT'S how slow it is at our house. I think it's because we live right next to a village and they're not using computers that much. Anyways...other than that small disappointment, I'm doing fine. I have to make this post real short cuz I'm using my Mom's laptop cuz our modem works best on hers. Go figure! The competition's doing well, we're just trying to get everything finished up. We're working on the Green City right now, everything's so last second it's kinda annoying. I need to get off.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Patience!

It's really late right now so I can't be on for like a whole lot of time,

I'm making a video post about our yard, it's about 7 minutes so that's gonna be pretty cool! This is what I've been working on. HD and everything. No, I don't have a new camcorder, we just borrowed a friend's for the WRO competition and I thought: hey, while we have it and all...

So please be PATIENT!
The Traveler

What the heck IS that page anywho?

Well, what is the page titled L I N E S all about?

You guys deserve the truth: L I N E S is an all-new comedic webcomic that I am in the process of creating! :D

Good news,

Dry Season is finally here!!! After all this time. You know, back in my Father's day, Dry Season would come in April. This year, it's coming about 7 months late. Yep. That definitely doesn't prove global warming, right? Some people are extremely horrible at interpreting sarcasm; IT DOES PROOVE GLOBALE WORRMINGG. Ok? Well, now that we have that little problem outta the way,

WRO Problems

I would've posted yesterday if it hadn't been for the freaking internet connection.

I don't exaggerate when I say that it hadn't worked for the whole day. We couldn't get to one single site. But this isn't the only thing that I'm angry with. Remember the post just before this one, the one called WRO Excitement? Well, I'm still excited about the competition, but I'm not happy at all with the Nigerian side of it. When I won, they said that my team and I would go to Dubai to represent Nigeria. Now the team includes the coach and everything, right? Well, at the last minute they tell us that they're not paying for the coach. Or the teachers. Or any adults. Just the KIDS. So how are we supposed to navigate ourselves through the airport, to the hotel, out of the hotel and all that junk? I'm not joking, they actually expected for the kids to go on their own. Now that's just disrespectful and shameful in so many ways. But it's not only this. For the competition in Lagos, we had built a robot for a specific section of the competition called the robot recycler. When we get back to Ife to go and improve on the design for Dubai (cause you would assume that what we were going to do again) the Nigerian company who's sponsoring all this tells us we can't do the robot recycler. Now we have to do something completely different. Not only that, but my father's the coach of my team. They want my father to coach two teams for two completely different sections of the competition. And they're STILL not paying for his ticket. Honestly, they're not giving him any support at all, whatsoever. They say they can't pay for the coach's ticket, so then why is it, that some people who aren't doing anything related to the team or the competition are coming to Dubai with us? Where did they get their money? Are you beginning to understand the problem now? Nigeria wants to go to an international competition for a few reasons. The first is that the people want to go to Dubai. The second is that they wanna say when it's all over that Nigeria was a part of an international competition. But honestly, I really think they don't actually care about any of this. If it's gonna be like this next year, I'm not participating.

Signing off,
The Traveler

WRO Excitement

First of all, let me first say that I am so sorry.

I haven't posted in the longest of time because of our internet connection. IT SUCKS. That's putting it lightly. I am not joking when I say that I've barely even been able to get onto any site for like weeks on end. But I have a lot to say; I'm going to Dubai! So that's gonna be really fun to post about. Why am I going to Dubai? Well, I just competed in Lagos. They were having a competition with the Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0; whoever went to go and represent the whole country at the WRO (World Robot Olympiad), in Dubai! Cool, right? Well, I WON, and now we are preparing with my team everyday, getting ready for the competition. In the section that we're doing, the Stair Climber, you have to build a robot that can go up and down some stairs while carrying an egg on it's back.Well, we have a working build, and it is blazing FAST. Thailand team can make theirs finish the whole task in 9.5 seconds. Well guess what; I think we're about to beat their record! We can actually win this thing!!! Please wish me luck.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Wild Backyard!

(This is actually an old post the because of internet I was never able to publish)

Our Backyard Backyard is wild!

I just walked Shep, and when  we went out there, we saw a streak of black run away at full speed. At first I thought that it was one of our goats, Blackhorn Jr., because it was completely black except for a white ring around it’s lower left paw. Then, I saw it’s tail; it was much too long to be a goats, and it had a white tip on it. Of course my dog was trying to chase after it like a crazy and he almost succeeded in doing so. He’s a German Shepherd. A HUGE one. So it’s always pretty hard to hold him back when he wants to do something. Yeah, I’m pretty lazy with the training stuff. :/ Well, anyway, I think what we saw was a black fox, if there’s such a thing as a black fox. Or it was a wild dog. We’ve actually seen dog and antelope tracks out there, so it’s not all that unlikely. And there were a few bones in that area too, even more proof that it was probably a dog. Weird right?

Signing off,

The Traveler

Confused

Remember I had posted about how Harmattan is on the way?

I was wrong. Or at least I think I was. This is why: the weather can't decide whether it wants to be Dry Season or Rainy Season. What do I mean? Well, here's what happened yesterday:

I wake up to a baking type of heat, there's not a cloud in the sky. Not ONE. The sun is bright and...well, sunny...and honestly, it's a burden. It's way too hot. Everyone's sweltering, everyone's sweating. Sounds like Dry Season to me! Well, at about around 5:00, a huge dark gray thundercloud sweeps over the sky, and then the heat suddenly disappears into that musty, just about to rain smell. And then there's an all-out downpour which lasts for a few hours and leaves everything drenched. Now that is a Rainy Season scenario. Two seasons in one day. Thank you, Global Warming!

Signing off,
The Traveler

New Renovation!

That's right,

I've switched to the new dynamic HTML5 Blogger templates! Awesome, right? What d'you guys think?

Signing off,
The Traveler

Slow Happenings

I don't know why,

But it takes forever for people to do anything here. Like for example, construction work takes super long, and then sometimes, you'll see a half-constructed building just sitting there for eternity without anyone working on it. I even have an example more personal than that. We're building a shop in the backyard backyard, so that we don't have to continue working on cars in our own compound; it piled up like crazy and one time I didn't even know where our own car was, and it was our yard! We have parking issues in our own front yard. Now that's bad. So that's why we're building a shop. We pay some people to build the roof for us right? We tell them that we'll pay them this much Naira for them to finish up the roof. They agree and all that...but they don't do the work! Every day they had asked for more and more money daily, even though they were supposed to get their pay when the job was done. So I think we fired them and we're doing it on our own. And then, only like a week ago, some people killed A COW in the back next to the still being built shop, and left the bones and everything still there! So now, when I walk my dog it's less of a walk and more of a "watch Shep eat the disgusting rotting bones for the rest of your life."

Signing off,
The Impatient Traveler

Healthy Foods

Ouch, I could've made a better title than that...


But anyway, I think most of you get what this post's about. Healthy Foods, in Nigeria. And here's where I throw the curve ball; even though we're in a country which you would expect for the foods to be healthy, a lot of them aren't. Let me clear that up: many of the vegetables in the market look like they're fresh from the farm and all that, and technically they are. BUT. The farmers had injected a whole bunch of crappy chemicals into them, inorganic pesticides and all that. The scary part is that most of the time, we don't really know what we're eating when we have a carrot. And a lot of Nigerians still wonder why there are strange outbreaks of cancer and other related diseases here. Now that's more than a little scary. Also, the foods that are imported from outside, like yogurt and things like that are usually full of things that are definitely not supposed to be ingested.  Ewww. So, healthy foods in Nigeria is complicated, just like in...oh what's that place...oh yeah. America. But, don't get me wrong; there are still way more fruits and naturally growing vegetables that are eaten here than in most "Western countries." Like for example, we have a coconut tree in our yard which is regularly harvested by us, and there's the guava trees, and mango trees...actually, if you want the whole list, look up the post that I did on it using the search bar at the bottom of the site. But, long story short, there are bad foods which should be healthy, allegedly healthy foods which should be bad, and bad foods that are just bad. Hope I cleared that up for you!

Signing off,
The Traveler

TV

I’ve just noticed how addicting watching TV is,

I mean, I know it’s been proved by science and everything, but I’ve had a personal experience with addictiveness and television. For days, I’ve been asking my parents if I could go watch the TV, and I’d watch a few hours of it. In that span of time I could’ve been doing so many other much more productive things; it’s okay to watch the occasional show once and a while, but too much of it can hurt you. But Nigerian kids, just like most American kids, love TV. Especially Ben 10. :/. Yeeah. I’m not a big fan of Ben 10. And when I mean Ben 10, I don’t mean Ben 10: Alien Force or Ben 10: Ultimate Alien; I mean Ben 10 Ben 10, the original. But I noticed that when a kid here watches something, they watch it. Like for example, we went to an old friend of my fathers, and we were watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Her son was acting out every movement and reciting every word of each episode that we watched. It was a little creepy. He’d even get into the poses and all of that and I was just watching him from my seat, afraid of moving, cause he might think that I wanted to join him in his reenactment. Wait, I just noticed I contradicted myself: in the beginning I said that TV was bad and all of that, but just now I told the story of a boy who was bouncing around because of TV. Confusing.

Signing off,

 The Traveler

Foreigners

Yeah, weird title for a post, but I couldn't think of anything else,

Anyway, let's get down to the nitty gritty: there are surprisingly a lot of people from outside of Nigeria in Nigeria. It's not like you're gonna see an American every day of the week or anything, but still, my Dad said that there used to be a lot less. Every once and a while you might see a man or woman from some country or the other and all that, but it never really hit me how many there actually were until we had visited IITA, which I have talked about in previous posts. There are so many of them there; I think there are probably as many foreigners or maybe more as there are Nigerians there. Some of them are businesspeople, and a lot of them came to this country because of money. Some others come to Nigeria and decide to stay because they believe that it's nicer or more convenient to live there. There are so many reasons why they come, but I think a lot of them come for business, because there are a lot of business opportunities here. For example, Nigerians want hamburgers, but there isn't really a McDonald's up the street, is there? So if one were to open up their own burger joint, they'd probably make a lot of money. That's why some foreigners have in places like Lagos and Abuja, the two most popular cities. But in places like Ibadan and our hometown in Nigeria, Ife, there are no malls or even movie theaters, so that opens up huge prospects for making money and opening up a service to Nigerians that wasn't there before. Now that's what I call smart!

Signing off,
The Traveler

New Page

Yes, there is now a mysterious new page,

Which states that something is coming sooooon...what is coming soon? Information on what is coming soon is coming soon!

Signing off,
The Mysterious Traveler

Game Night Today

(Because of internet speeds I wasn't able to post this on time, so this is actually a few weeks old. :P)

We’re having another Game Night today,

And we’re thinking of barbecueing again. It doesn’t sound like much, barbecueing at a party and all, does it? Well, in Nigeria, there is no such thing as a “barbeque chicken” or anything like that. You can only buy barbecue in special stores (definitely not in the market), I don’t even remember seeing a grill anywhere to use. Yeah, so barbecue is not a part of everyday Nigerian life and culture; but I tell you, where we are, in the center of the Yoruba people, I can definitely say one thing about the Yorubas: they like meat. A LOT. You can find jerky-like meat called suya, meat which they call “meat”(?!) which Americans call beef…all type of stuff. And almost all of it is fried till it’s about the tenderness of a rock. A really hard rock. I really have no idea how I or they eat it. I remember when we first came here, and I think I almost broke my jaw trying to chew it. Are you a fan of Jawbreakers? Then come here to Nigeria, and if you aren’t vegetarian, go ask for a cube of beef with that rice and stew; you are going to meet your match!

Signing off,

 The Traveller

?

Now this isn't particularly connected to my travellings,

But I have to ask this question. A while ago I made a fantasy blog that was about a blogging wizard. What if I created another blog like this? What's you guy's opinion? And seriously, I need some answers here, I'll post a poll too about it.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Harmattan is on The Way

It’s getting much hotter,

And I’m beginning to feel the getting-baked-in-an-oven feeling that you always get whenever Harmattan is on its way. Dry Season can also be called Harmattan, and I switch it up sometimes, call it different things. One thing though that I am happy about seeing with the arrival of Dry Season is sun! Beautiful sun! In Wet Season it’s a dark gray cloudy overhang from morning till evening, and man, it can get a little gloomy. But now, the sky is a nice bright blue and the sun is not hiding behind any clouds. I think the most annoying things about these overhangs is that they are so dark of a gray and they look so ominous that you think it’s going to rain, so you’re preparing to get a huge downpour and everything, but nothing happens and you get all frustrated and stuff cause you were expecting something and bam the Earth’s weather patterns have to disappoint you. Also I’ve been craving for some of the fruits that grow on our trees in the yard but none of them have come out yet, so I asked my Father when they came out. He said they came out in Spring. There is no Spring in Nigeria. Thanks Father. Again.

Signing off,

The Traveler