I just travelled down to Abuja for tomorrow’s VSO Leavers’ Forum. They’ve still not quite explained what it’s for and what we’re going to be doing (helpful as apparently I’m facilitating) but it’s a good excuse to meet up with lots of people.<\/p>\n
The journey down was uneventful and I was having trouble staying awake, as usual. It is always amazing to see the change in scenery caused by the little rain we’ve had so far. Bright green grass is starting to cover the deep red soil and the dust has washed off everything, making it all look fresh and new.<\/p>\n
The bush taxi journeys have been more enjoyable since I got back from my holiday in April. At Schiphol I bought myself a set of noise cancelling earphones (Sony MDR-NC22<\/a>, review<\/a>), the idea being that I can listen to my iPod without having it turned up to ear-destroying volume. I was surprised to find that they actually work really well in cars, given that they’re really designed for use in aircraft. The tight-fitting earphones block out a lot of noise by themselves and the active noise cancellation circuitry is very effective at reducing the wind and road noise.<\/p>\n Abuja is changing rapidly, I think I notice the differences more since I moved to Kaduna. New road junctions, construction sites for new buildings and a rash of new street signs and signs indicating the way to major landmarks. Somewhere in the city there’s even a building site that’s the beginning of Abuja’s rail mass transit scheme.<\/p>\n While I was writing yesterday’s post I had to sit out on my doorstep to get a decent wireless signal. As I was typing away one of the conference centre staff strolled past to the grassy area opposite my house, stripped off and started having a shower. Seems odd given the huge number of empty rooms in the place, maybe management won’t let staff use them or maybe he just prefers showering outdoors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just travelled down to Abuja for tomorrow’s VSO Leavers’ Forum. They’ve still not quite explained what it’s for and what we’re going to be doing (helpful as apparently I’m facilitating) but it’s a good excuse to meet up with lots of people. The journey down was uneventful and I was having trouble staying awake, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends","category-tech","category-vso"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}