The Internet

Since being here because of us lacking in internet connectivity I have been able to realize how much we depend on the internet.
In America I did not think about internet connections. It was the last thing that I would have ever thought about. But amazingly I was accessing the internet all of the time. The connection part became almost invisible. Now though I notice our internet a lot because it usually doesn't work anyway. We're happy when we get 45 kilobytes per second! For those of you who don't know what that means, it means that Facebook can take ages to load. Fortunately the speeds have been improving over the months yet I still remember when we first came here and we could barely ever access the internet. And now Microsoft has released a public beta for their next version of Windows: Windows 8. I'm using it right now. And now that I'm using the new features I can see that in a few years from now the difference between the internet and real-life will blur until there will be no separation. Almost all of the features in this new Windows uses internet to retrieve information. Even the replacer of Windows Media Player, the Music App, uses the internet so you can buy songs right in your music library! What next?! And what's next for countries like Nigeria where getting access to a high speed internet connection is a very hard feat? Will they be left in the dust, not able to access information as quickly and easily as the rest of the world? Hopefully the internet connection will keep on getting faster or else...it won't be good.

Signing off,
The Traveler

How to Not Look Like a Jerk in Nigeria

From my 2 years of living here I've compiled a few DOs and DON'Ts of Nigerian culture and stuff like that. Let the information commence!

Rule 1-Whatever you do don't bring Fido

This rule is extremely important-if you're trying to meet a Nigerian don't bring a dog along with you! All that you'll see of him/her is the dust he/she kicked up after running away from you like a maniac. It's a very big fear! I bet that if you put a dog in your trunk and there was a police checkpoint up ahead of you the minute they hear that dog bark they'll keep five miles away from you. This is one of the most important rules. Not the most important but way up there.

Rule 2-Do Not Trash Talk Nigeria

This is a weird one. What you're probably saying is "why would I ever dream of insulting a Nigerian's country?" But lemme warn you: Nigerians are complainers. THEY can complain about their country but not you. They are a very prideful people and they will not take any Mr./Ms. Foreigner complaining crap. Here's an example. Let's say that you had just arrived in Ibadan from an airport in Lagos. A Nigerian was asking how your trip from Lagos was and you say politely that the road was a little bumpy but other than that it was fine:

NIGERIAN: You know! The roads--Ah, they are so bad--My God!

YOU: *Nods quietly in agreement*

NIGERIAN: Honestly. It is the government's fault; nothing gets done here! Our politicians are so corrupt.

YOU: Well my country (insert home country here)'s politics isn't so nice either.

NIGERIAN: No no no no--you do not know Nigeria yet! Nigeria-AH!-it's so corrupt--did you know that (Nigerian Politician) just took (Large sum) of Naira only (Recent date)?! Oh God...I don't know what will happen to this country...

YOU: Yeah, there is a lot more corruptness here than I'm used to I guess.

NIGERIAN: *Pauses* Do not insult my country in front of me. This is Nigeria, you're not in (your home country) anymore! This is Nigeria! Are you a Nigerian? You are not! I mean...

And so on. So Rule #2 is a huge one. DO NOT FORGET IT.

Rule 3-You Gotta Like Soccer

Actually not only do you have to like soccer you gotta like either Manchester Utd. or Arsenal or Chelsea. That's the end of it. Nigerians are crazy about those three teams. I have no idea why but yeah. You HAVE to like soccer. In America when things get dull you ask "so how about them Yankees?" In Nigeria you ask "so how about them Chelsea?" Got it? Good. I believe that if you wanted to you could scientifically prove that no matter what topic of conversation you start out with when talking with a Nigerian, you are going to end up talking about soccer. That's it. Oh one more thing-if you're from America you can't call soccer soccer. You have to say football okay? It's what the rest of the Earth says when talking about the sport. So what do they call Superbowl football then? They call it American football. After all of this information has sunk in go on to the next rule.

Rule 4-Exaggeration is Key

Okay here's a situation: you're watching TV after you just landed in Nigeria and you're in the Oriental Hotel. Suddenly with shock you remember that you're late for a very important meeting! You get dressed hurriedly and you're rushing out the door. Your cellphone starts ringing so you answer it. It's the person you're meeting on the line: "Hello? Where are you?" What do you do?

A: You say with an apologetic tone, "Sorry I'm going to be a little late!"

B: You hang up. Then you take the battery out of your cellphone.

C: You say as you put your underwear on: "I'm already here! Can't you see me waving at you?" Then you hang up and continue watching Mythbusters.

D: You ask the person if they could wait for just a smidge longer and if they can't then you'd just have to reschedule.

If you picked A then you haven't been in Nigeria long enough. If you picked D then you just need to go back to wherever you came from. If you picked B that's an okay move--but the best is C. C is your greatest choice because Nigerians love doing this. If somebody asks you where you are you just say "I'm coming" then continue your 8 hour nap. No harm done because the thing is, is that the Nigerian that your supposed to be meeting up with would do the same thing to you so they kind of don't mind. Speaking of being late that brings us to the last rule for now, rule number 5:

Rule 5-Set Your Mind to Nigerian Time

If you don't set your mind on Nigerian Time you will not be able to survive. It is impossible to do anything productive in Nigeria without being on Nigerian time. I made a simple formula so you know what Nigerian time is: an event (variable e) is multiplied by how important it is (variable i) to give you the excess time (variable t). So add t to the real time (variable r) and you get the Nigerian Time (variable n). So:

t + r = n

(e + i) = t

Here's a for the base values that e can be:

Birthday Party = e = 30 minutes
Wedding = e = 1 hour
Presentation = e = 1 hour and 30 minutes

Here's an example of the formula in action. You know that your friend's Nigerian Time birthday is going to start at around 12:00 PM. She's a rather popular person and a lot of people are coming. Her importance is high. Therefore:

(30 + 30) = 1 hour

1 hour + 12:00 PM = 1:00 PM

You should set out for your friend's birthday party at around 12:55. Now this is extremely timely for Nigerian standards. Sometimes you need to tweak the values of i and e but usually the result time is at least r + 1 hour. In normal English though what I mean is that no matter what you do come to a Nigerian Time event one hour late because you'll be early. Paradoxical Paradox!!!

That's all I have for now but this was really fun for me to write up. Who knows; maybe I'll make another soon!

Signing off,
The Traveler

Rock Cakes are Rocky

My birthday's coming up soon.

It's on April 28th. My sister's is April 27th. She's four years younger than me...paradoxical paradox. But anyway we're having a joint birthday party. We're having it at this restaurant in Osogbo called Ostrich Bakery with breads muffins and all of that sort of stuff. But what I really want from them is a birthday cake. Problem is though is that we're afraid. You see, most of the cakes that we've had here in Nigeria are so crappy it's unbelievable. I must have made a post about that somewhere. Seriously though they are bad. About two years ago my Dad had gotten somebody to bake a chocolate cake for my Mom's birthday. He would've done it himself but we didn't and still don't have a working oven. So the place he went to get it done was on OAU, in the department that deals with baking and chemistry and all that stuff. The woman that was making it for us promised us that the chocolate cake would be moist and delicious. She said she knew baking like the back of her hand! So we were super happy when we took the cake back home and saw how great the icing looked and all that junk. So we were gonna let my Mom cut the cake. At first we thought she was playing; she kept trying to push the knife through the cake. My Dad had to go and push as hard as he could for it finally to give way. That was when we knew something was wrong. I didn't have any of it but my family said it tasted something like hard rock earth. Yeah. So we're not taking chances anymore. Before we agreed to anything this time we asked for a sample of one of their cakes at the Ostrich Bakery. The man who we were talking to assured us that this cake is a lot softer than the normal Nigerian ones. We tried it and we wondered if Nigerians had a sense of taste. :( Luckily we found another type which is somewhat better, so we're telling the Ostrich Bakery people to make that. What's with the rock cakes?!

Signing off,
The Traveler

MIE BLAK KADZ R IVYLLL

Translation: My black cat are evil.

WAIT! DON'T SPAM ME W/ HATE STUFF YET! What I mean to say is that every Nigerian says that my black kittens are evil. I just changed the "your" part so I could catch you guys' attention. :) But seriously, I'm pretty much sick of this. All they do is complain about how black cats the Devil and all that. One of them even said we should have gotten white cats instead. I call that stupidness. They think that all of these fears of black cats are just a part of their ancient culture and tradition. IT'S NOT. I did some background research and discovered that actually, in their Origin stories about the world, the Yoruba main God's son came down to the Earth. He brought a chicken to make land, sand for the land, and a BLACK CAT for FRIENDLY COMPANY. In the Yoruba religion animals can talk, and the black cat was completely nice. I think it's really sad that they have their own stories twisted. All of this black cat junk came from Europeans. It started with some Pope and then it skyrocketed since that. Even here. I see it as kind of racial self-hatred as well. Look at it this way: the Nigerian who said we should have gotten another type of cat had at first just said she was afraid of our black cat. That's not as bad, but why was that she said that we should have gotten specifically a white cat instead? To them, white is right. I seriously don't believe in that. White is not right. Neither is any other ethnicity. We are all Homo Sapiens. This is a problem not only in Nigeria but all over the world. We seriously need to deal with this. If we don't, we'll all be thinking somebody is better than another. That's not cool AT ALL. D:

Signing off,
The Traveler

Maybe I'm Just Outta the Loop But...

...am I the only person who didn't know that plantains are giant leaves?

My parents own a plantain farm in the BACKYARD backyard, and I went back there today with my Dad to go and prune the plants or whatever it's called when you chop off the dead parts. Plantains look weak to me, IMO. They're just tall stalks with a lot of brown dead skins covering them. A lot of their leaves shrivel up and die and just hang off of them. And even the healthy leaves look sorta wither-ishy. My Dad says they're really really hardy. He just says we gotta do all this chopping off all the dead parts stuff because we want the biggest fruit we can get from them. I'm pretty excited but already I'm a bit disappointed. About a year ago when we had the chicken farm (I posted about that, search for chicken farm) I thought we would have so much chicken on the dinner table I wouldn't know what to do with myself. This was such an untrue moment, it was absolutely unbelievable. Instead of getting chicken galore we had to watch all of it get sold to the customers. We probably ate maybe seven out of the hundreds of darn chickens that we were selling to everyone else! I think it's gonna be another one of those situations when the plantains start bearing fruit. I love plantain. I love fried plantain (dodo), I love plantains made into chips (ibekere). I love it ALL. But unfortunately for me the rest of the country does as well. :0 So what am I supposed to do? I'm just gonna have to be tortured and watch all of the plump fruits be sold to a whole bunch of people I don't even know. Or maybe I'll wait until the minute the plantains are ripe, snatch them all up, fry in them in the middle of the night, and eat them all selfishly. And then the next day I'll probably throw up for three hours straight from grease overload. I might have to reboot myself after that. NOT COOL.


Signing off,
The Traveler

Years

It's been a very long time since we left for Nigeria.

I remember back when I was 11 and I was so excited about coming. For some reason back then when I googled to my heart's content about Nigeria I could never get any good information about the country. Right now though, if I google "Nigeria" I get way more stuff than I could ever want. That's strange. I seriously can't believe that it's been...over two years?...since we came here. It's felt like forever. Not in a bad way, but not in a good way either. But at the same time, it seems like time is speeding up too fast, that it's just rocketing away. I might be confusing a few people, but I don't mean to; that's the best way for me to describe it. Look at how much stuff I've done here, and it such a short span of time! I traveled to Abu Dhabi, met new people, did all sorts of stuff. I sort of wonder where I would be in my life if I hadn't come here either. What would have happened if I had spent the last two years back in Durham, in North Carolina? Would I have seen and done so many new things? I bet not. This might sound extremely weird: I kind of miss the sort of things that I wouldn't have even noticed if I were in America. Like having a nice high-pressure shower for a change. Or being able to just walk down the street to the nearest electronics store and buy whatever I need. And socializing with friends who were raised in the same culture that I've been. Don't get me wrong, I'm super glad I came here because I've seen a lot of awesome stuff. I also believe that if I had never come here, then I don't think that I would've ever gotten the idea for L I N E S, the webcomic which I'm about to start publishing soon. I think a lot of things wouldn't have happened. Like I would have never gotten Shep, Night, or Harry Potter of course. And we would have never even have thought of the possibility of acquiring a few pet goats if we were in the USA. It's weird. It's like I like it here and I'm grateful for all the amazing experiences I had, but I wanna go home and experience the boring stuff at the same time. That doesn't make any sense to me. I want to experience going to the grocery store, and laughing with my friends, and just goofing off. I'm confusing myself.

Signing off,
The Traveler

The Dog. He's Big.

Ok, the title's not accurate.

It's more like: "AH! YOUR DOG IS TOO FRIGGIN BIG! HE COULD CHOP MY HEAD OFF!!!" Yeah, that's more like it. The exclamations in capital letters are what Nigerians usually say when they stroll into the yard and see Shep. I posted a few pics of him about...forever ago. He's grown. A lot. When I mean a lot, I mean "people who are afraid of dogs, don't try to imagine what he looks like" a lot. Like bigger than big itself. Bigger than...I can't tell you how big. Ok. I've exaggerated. But on a serious note here, Nigerians are really afraid of dogs for reasons that I can not understand. It's like they have some sort of repulsion to them. And they'll be all like "HAHA YOU CAN'T GET ME" but for example if Shep was let loose in the yard then they'd be screaming their butts off. My Dad claims humorously that if the police tried to search your car and you had a    German Shepherd (or Alsatian if you're British) in the trunk then they'd just let you go right on your way. Even with all of their machine guns and all that. I don't know what happened. It's not that every Nigerian doesn't own a dog. There are quite a few who do. There's actually this breed of local dog which we have named the Local Dog breed. Yes, I know, we put a lot of effort into our names for things. The problem is though is that most Nigerians beat their dogs all the time :(. Positive reinforcement hasn't come to Nigeria yet! There was actually this one girl who I met who said she wanted a dog so I was all like "Ok" and then she looked all confused when I said that I'd be back after I walked my dog and she asked me "Why do you do that?" This is the girl who wants a dog. Go figure that one out. Then tell me. It'll save me the trouble.

Signing off,
The Traveler