Caboose

Over the past week I’ve been combining catching up with my family with packing up all my possessions and shipping them off to Sweden (using Seven Seas). Today I followed them, flying out to Linköping via Copenhagen.

I’m renting a furnished apartment until August, so that I can take my time looking around for a more permanent apartment that I can then furnish exclusively from IKEA. In fact I’ll be going in there tomorrow for a few things I need right now.

I have a new job. From March I’ll be working for Opera Software , at their office in Linköping in Sweden.

More specifically I’ll be working on the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones. If your phone supports Java (most do) then it’s worth trying Opera Mini, the built-in browser on most phones is dire!

So, when I get back from my trip around the world I’ll have about a week to unpack, visit people and then repack and move out to Linköping.

I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Benin City, drinking Crystal beer brewed at the Bendel Brewery next door.

On the label it gives the strength as “5% +- 0.5%”. This is a lot more honest than other Nigerian beers, claiming to be exactly 5.2% when everyone knows it’s more like “somewhere between 2 and 8 percent”.

This week I’m down in Enugu and Benin City, continuing our work at NTI’s zonal offices.
I’m waiting for the carpenter and electrician to finish, watching TV. An advert just came on for a book launch: “100 Reasons Why IBB is a Great Man”. That’s IBB the former military dictator, looter of the Nigerian Treasury, political godfather and self-proclaimed “evil genius” (he’s half right). The book launching’s supported by the current Senate leader.

On my travels I’ve ended up watching a lot of TV in hotel rooms.

Tonight the Nigerian version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ was on. The contestant was a bit stuck, so phoned a friend. The friend’s side of the conversation went something like this:

Hello? I can’t hear you. Who is speaking? Hello?

It continued like that until his 30 seconds ran out. The joke is that the show is sponsored by MTN.

I was walking across to the office this morning as the gardeners were spreading out across campus to start work for the day. One of the younger guys must have been left behind, he was running to catch up with some of the others. As he ran along the road, he leaned over and dragged his machete along the tarmac.

For me the sight and sound of the young gardener sharpening his machete immediately reminded me of film of the Rwandan genocide, showing how easily perfectly normal words, sounds and actions acquire hideous new meanings. It really did send a shiver up my spine.

I’m sitting in a car in the motor park in Bauchi, waiting for one more passenger before we can leave for Kaduna.

I spent the weekend at Yankari national park, we were lucky and actually saw some wildlife.

I’m writing this on my phone to pass the time sitting in the terrible heat.

My lovely IBM ThinkPad laptop seems to be dead, it suddenly turned off last night and won’t come back on.

This means that I’m temporarily without access to my saved emails and most of the rest of my personal stuff. I’m hoping the hard disk is still OK and I can get all the useful data off it but until then I won’t be checking my email very often.

Looks like it’s just as well I’m taking a holiday back to the UK in April, the laptop is still under warranty and I’d rather have IBM/Lenovo’s UK people deal with it than send my laptop to the “service provider” in Lagos.

This weekend a group of us headed off to visit Jenny, Karin and Sue in Akwanga. They’re all working at the college of education there, trying to improve the standard of teacher training.

The main activity was a trip to the waterfalls at Farin Ruwa:

Six of us left Abuja early on Saturday, squeezed into a car at Kabo motor park. Although we had to pay for two empty seats this actually just meant that there were only two people in the back row and nobody had to sit on the gearstick!
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