Making Friends!

Vendredi…


I finally fell asleep and then woke up promptly at 3 a.m. Thanks jet lag, that’s 10p.m. CST, my prime operating time. It still hasn’t passed yet. And it definitely sucked for the first few days, especially that morning. I didn’t end up getting to back to sleep until the sun came up. It is a good thing that I have had a ton of practice at sleeping in while the sun is coming up. Except this time my sleeping in made me late for breakfast. I ended up waking up to Zachari knocking on our door at 10 a.m. asking us why we weren’t downstairs a half an hour earlier. Oops.

We made our way back to the restaurant where our place at the table was already set and the large thermos full of oats sat waiting to be eaten. Oh and the night before, Colin had some reservations about drinking the water at the restaurant, but I assured him that it was alright to do so (not knowing for sure myself, but I had to comfort the fact that I had already drank a ¼ of the 1½ litre bottle). The water was fine, but for breakfast Colin was still unsure about the water even though nothing bad had happened the night before. We ended up ordering beer. The natives must have thought that we were some of the strangest white folk that they had ever seen.

During breakfast we began to get to know the restaurant staff a little better, our waiter, Kassim, in particular. Remember the description of Zachari? Kassim ou Yves, is the exact opposite. He looks like a scrawny college freshman and has a very soft and high-pitched voice. After talking with him for a little while, Zachari took us to the Centre-Ville to buy phones, sim kartes, and go to the bank, because the Lord knows that we weren’t prepared at all upon arriving the night before. I would think that most people would have had a panic attack had they gone out and tried to do what we did, but that is also the exact reason why it is me sitting here writing to you and not them. That is my style of travel and it works well so long as you know what you’re doing and you remember this one simple piece of advice: it is impossible to get lost (I will explain more later)

Back to the not philosophical stuff. My phone number is 2286019867 so if anyone wants to chat feel free to hit me up! Its free for me to receive calls and I have no idea how much it costs to place a call to Togo. But I do know that Skype is roughly 2 cents a minute with a 5 cent connection fee. After messing around with the phones and being chaufered around by Zachari at the expense of Felix, we went back to the hotel for a bit before meandering around to try and find a cyber café. Once we found one and logged on, we soon realized that we were using 21st century technology and moving at the blazing speed of the early 90’s – talk about frustrating. And to compound that frustration, facebook thought that I was a hacker due to the logging on roughly two continents away from my last known location and made me go through a four-step process that included identifying friends and answering questions. Only, it took about five minutes to load each question and picture and I ended up running out of time before it was completed. I have yet to verify my account.

We went back to the hotel afterward sending a few emails, and ran into a Togolese guy from Toronto and a woman from Missouri. We had a nice little chat and then went off to dinner at the restaurant. They served us the same thing as the night before, except this time with rice instead of fries, and then returned to the bar underneath our hotel, had a beer and went to bed.