Why we Need THE PACKAGE

Our Aunt is coming in less than a week,

And we’re really excited. Not just because she’s coming, but also because she’ll be bringing a whole bunch of things that we need here. You see, I’ve hinted about us needing different things in posts like the care package and stuff, but most of you are probably thinking, why don’t we just buy the things that we need here? Well it’s because either none of the stores have what we need, or they’re selling it at a crazy price, or it’s been used and the thing would only be “new to you.” For some reason the Nigerian customers would rather go for cheap and horrible rather than not cheap and of higher quality. I think that’s one of the main reasons why a lot of the Chinese products here (it makes up a big hunk of the market kinda like in America) break down in a month IF YOU’RE LUCKY. So even if they brought the nicer versions of the products that they’re selling here now, I don’t think many Nigerians would buy them. Also part of the reason why Nigerians wanna go for cheap so badly is because they’re stuck in this way of thinking: you don’t need to maintain anything, but when things break down, go buy another one. Not a very good mentality, but I guess that China’s happy. But it’s not only the Nigerian’s fault. Sometimes, they do want quality products or they have no other choice but getting a quality product, and nobody’s selling it in all of Nigeria. I think that this is America’s fault, because, I’m gonna be honest: America is selfish. It doesn’t like sharing, because then it won’t feel as powerful as before, and if it does share then that might help Nigeria become like them, and that’s the last thing that America wants; for any country to be like America. But we’re affected by this, because now I’m not able to get my Dell laptop without hundreds of dollars for shipping fees. Overall, Nigeria, and most African countries are not in a good situation, and I don’t like it.

Signing off,

The Traveler

Wanna Go to the Movies?

Did you know?

We have a miniature movie theater in our house! No, not like the Obama’s theater; this one is in our living room. My parents bought a whole world of projectors and stuff before we moved, and now we use them for movies. It’s a whole set, we have the screen and everything. Like a year ago we used to use the screen to have a little theater for the people of the village next door, who loved movies like the Matrix, but they wanted to see it on a bigger screen. I think that my mother and father were planning on selling or renting them before but I guess they haven’t gotten around to it or something. Kind of like how I had thought that I would try to sell the 5 Wiis that I have sitting in their boxes around the house.

Signing off,

The Traveler

Bird Trouble

Birds are beautiful here in Nigeria,

It’s just a fact; I’ve seen so many colorful, vibrant birds here that I’ve almost lost count. But every time I’d spot one, it’d quickly dart away, screaming into the sky. Well, a week ago, the whole family finally got to look at one up close! Here’s what happened:

We were sitting around in the house, when we heard a peculiar sound coming from the study area, COMING FROM THE CEILING. At first we had no idea what it was, but for a while I was looking at our roof like it was alive after that. And you would do that same thing to if every time you went in your study to watch a show or something the roof started thumping out Morse code to you. At first we thought that the problem might have been rats, but why would rats be living in the roof anyway? And besides, the thumping went on in broad daylight as well, so that didn’t sound so likely. Then one day, my father was outside in the backyard, for some unkown reason, and he saw a bright blue bird, flying out of a little hole in our roof. He only saw it for a few seconds, but he said that it was really pretty, and it’s beak was huge. We all wanted to see it, (we also wanted it to go away,) so we devised a plan. Whenever any of us heard the thumping on the roof, my Dad and I would go outside, climb up our ladder, which we had leaned on the side of the house over the hole, and use our fishing net to catch it. It sounded pretty easy in our heads, and we were all like “yeah!” and “okay,” but it wasn’t a walk in the park. The first time we tried we stayed there for like forever and nothing came out. The second time, we learned to things: that birds are smart, and that this bird had a boy/girlfriend. We were up there on the ladder, when we noticed that there was another blue bird watching us on a palm tree. It had flown out just before we were coming, but the thumping was still loud in there, which meant that another bird was still inside there, pecking away at our ceiling. After we tried scaring it into our net (we would bang on the side of the roof and hope that it would fly into the net), we kind of gave up and started climbing back down. And the minute we had reached the ground, that little blue bird that had been resting on the palm tree started screaming it’s song to the roof, and then started flying away. The other bird got the message, and darted out of there after it. We weren’t very happy. But luckily, the third time was a big success; we used our scaring technique, and got one of the birds that was in our roof! It was…wait, lemme not describe it. I’ll just show it to you: I told you my dad said it’s beak was too big for it’s body. We let it go after everyone saw it. My mom looked at it through the window. But anyway, we let it go, and we haven’t had anymore thumping problems since. And guess what? The minute we let the darn thing go is when my Dad thinks about what happened and said, “hmm, maybe that bird wasn’t destroying our roof after all. It could have just been eating the bugs.” Wow. Thanks A LOT father. Real quick thinking.

Signing off

The Traveler

P.S. I can't show it to you right right now because of technical difficulties (in other words Multilinks Telkom), so I'll post the pics as my next post or something.

Birthday @ Abuja

I've been absent for a while,

And I have a reason why; I've been BUSY. For 1, I just turned 13 about a week ago; 2, I've been busy taking care of Shep and fixing the computer and editing my novel and....and....hah...hah....lemme take a breather....ok, now I feel better, but instead of focusing on everything that I've been doing these past days in this 1 post, I'll talk about my birthday, which I believe is the most interesting thing to write about, because I had the most unique birthday yet. Do you know why? I had my birthday in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria! But man, was the drive looooooong...it felt like we were never going to reach the city. But surprisingly, I wasn't bored out of my mind at all; actually, the drive was pretty interesting. We live in Ile-Ife, and the climate there is pretty rainforesty, with a whole bunch of dark green foliage growing everywhere. But the closer we got to Abuja, the more the vegetation changed. Around halfway, the trees started becoming less compact, the forests almost began to remind me of the ones in Durham. And there were a whole bunch of mountains and giant rocks, which were really beautiful. There were whole towns perched on the wide curving tops of these giant rocks, with regular streets and shops and everything. My father pointed out that after a while there were no more palm trees growing. He said that this was because that closer we got to Abuja, the dryer it got, and he was right. When we were riding on the highway going to Abuja, the whole landscape started to become savannah. The grass was dying and there were barely any trees in sight. And it was hot. Abuja itself though wasn’t anything like a savannah. You see, Nigerians always call Abuja the jewel of the country, and that it’s the best city; they claimed that the electricity was steady in Abuja, the streets were clean in Abuja, the buildings were beautiful in Abuja. Abuja Abuja Abuja Abuja Abuja. Abuja. So when I got there I had expected a city that was as large as Lagos maybe, except so much cleaner, and so many more commodities and movie theaters and all types of different awesome stuff. In other words, I thought it was going to be one big Victoria Island, one of the better parts of Lagos. I was wrong. If Abuja was a cake, it would be a large modern wedding cake that’s been half baked, and the parts that were cooked were slightly burnt around the edges or lopsided. That’s Abuja for ya! Why is it like this? Well, the half-baked feeling started even before we got into the main city. In political commercials, when they show Abuja, they show hundreds of cars from a distance streaming into the Abuja Gate, a large (NOT) white structure that guards the entrance to the capital. When we got there, I could barely believe my eyes; the media had tricked us by using an optical illusion; YOU CAN’T DRIVE THRU THE GATE!! When the highway split around the gate there was a little sign which said in capitals, THE GATE IS DECORATION. GO AROUND. There was a feeble attempt of shrubbery surrounding the gate, but it made the whole thing look even worse. Welcome to Abuja. Even behind the gate was pretty freaky looking, like there was this rusty miserable looking sign to an amusement park, and a half-constructed bus stop. But, anyway, when we got into the main city, my sister and I kept asking if arrived in the wrong city. The roads were nicely paved, yes, but the place looked like a SimCity game; buildings just seemed half built and out of nowhere. That’s because the city is still under construction even though people live in it. You’ll see a lot of cranes in Abuja lifting huge metal columns and putting them in place. And the myth about constant electricity? In the first few minutes there when we were about to check into our mediocre hotel, the lights went out. Sorry, but I’d take V.I. any day than Abuja. There’s nothing to do either. There’s only like one mall, and that mall barely has anything in it, and the theater in the mall doesn’t have anything of interest in it anyway. Long story short, Abuja is still under construction, and when it’s finished it’ll be really nice, but right now….I’ll be waiting in Lagos, thank you very much.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Scratched HDD?!

It might not sound like much, but it's what's been occupying my mind for days.

I made a little slip-up a few days ago. Ok, it wasn't small; it's been making everyone go crazy for the longest. Here's what happened (short story version): I dropped our Lenovo. There. At first I was pretty freaked out because, duh, I dropped the laptop, so we quickly turned it on, and guess what? It worked (apparently)! After a while of using it though, my Dad saw that there was something seriously amiss. The computer was freezing when we brought up any substantial program, and it was crashing in the strangest of ways. I saw some error messages that day that I don't even think Bill Gates is aware of. Windows 7 became almost completely corrupt, and we decided to turn off the computer until we could fix it, when I got an idea. A while ago, I had downloaded Ubuntu 10.10 onto a jump drive, cause I thought that the OS was pretty cool. Well UBUNTU SAVED OUR LIVES. Not because it's better than Windows or anything, but because since it was on a jump drive and not on the master HDD, it wasn't affected by our crazy broken Lenovo. It scanned the main drive and found out that it was scratched. When I dropped it, the needle must have hit the surface of the disk too hard or something, and parts of the drive are now bad sectors. Right now I'm righting this post in Ubuntu, and we're planning on copying all of our files from the corrupt drive to a new drive, then putting our OSs back on the corrupt drive. By then though, we would have gotten the corrupt sectors out of the way of the rest of the HDD, so it will become usable again. Sorry, I forgot not everyone likes computers as much as I do; I don't think many people reading will be very interested in listen to me talk about how I just got a C++ IDE. Which is cool anyway.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Blackhorn Jr. & Fuzzy

Right-Ear gave both to two baby kids!

I could barely believe it when I heard two whining bleats outside the window, and I looked out and saw them! She gave birth to two kids; we named one Blackhorn Jr., because he looks almost identical to another goat that lives in the village. The other we named Fuzzy, because she's...uh...fuzzy. Here are some pictures:

That's Fuzzy as she walks out from under the broken lawn mower. It's where she and her brother usually sleep.

The little kid to the right is Blackhorn Jr., that's the mother in the middle. Fuzzy I think is trying to get a drink from the mother's utter.

It's amazing that they're only 3 days old, yet they're walking around as if they've been alive for months! Wouldn't it be creepy if our babies could do that? Now, what if they learned to speak a language instantly too...

Signing off,
The Traveler

Brownie's Back!

I could barely believe it when we found out!!!

Brownie had been hiding in the village for almost a whole month, living in another person's yard! We found out this from a person that we know who heard from a villager that a very strange, scary (to them), and supposedly supernatural goat had arrived at their doorstep. She would eat paper! She would try to come inside the house! She had a very strange piece of rope around her neck (it was a collar)! She would even jump onto their windowsill, and bleat there all their the night in their ears when they tried to go to sleep! We were pretty excited, so we sent someone to go and see if it was really her, and he came back empty handed. At first we were disappointed, but he told us the whole story: he saw her, and called to her, but she didn't answer, so he tried to go and catch her, when she went berserk and dashed away like a crazed animal. Then she ran up the stairs of a building, all the way up to the second floor! He started climbing up, when she actually JUMPED off the second floor, and landed on her hoofs!!! Impossible right? Sounded like it to me, but Brownie can really surprise somebody! So my dad went with the guy again, and Brownie let him pick her up. They came back home with Brownie! At first we thought that she tried to run away on purpose in the first place, but we think that it might have been that she went into the field in the backyard, got lost, and followed some village goats back to their home. Completely crazy and crazy!

Signing off,
The Traveler