Settled in

We are all settled into the University now. It was a crazy drive getting over here. Lisa and I were in a Toyota van (we don't have this model at home) with no seat belts with Paul’s brother Bennet. Bennet is a really cool guy and I hope we get to see a lot more of him while we are here. Abigail and Paul were in an SUV ahead of us most of the time. When we were on the highway, we were driving fast all the time, pedal to the floor whenever there was space. I checked the speedometer a couple times and we were doing about 150km/hr and we were 8 to 10 feet behind Abigail & Paul’s SUV. It got a little sketchy when the SUV in front had to slam on the brakes for various reasons like giant pot holes, other cars, motor cycles or people. I was worried at first but then I soon realized that the drivers we had were very good at their jobs and if they’ve survived this far in life driving like this, then I’ve got nothing to worry about and I managed to get some sleep in the car. I took some videos of the driving and I’ll upload them to You Tube when I get a chance.

As you can tell, we got internet today but we have to pay for it by the hour. Hopefully this is something we can change for the students while we are here. We also just got running water today in our building. Apparently it wasn’t working because they hooked up the plumbing into the electrical system by accident. I don’t know how one would accomplish that, but it happened… somehow.

All of the people we have met here and very friendly, happy and are genuinely glad to have us here. The police look very intimidating dressed in all black with the flak jackets and AKs either in their hand or slung on their shoulder, but the officers that we have talked to have all been very friendly and welcoming. I haven’t got any photos of the police yet, but they will come.
Almost everyone speaks English but they use the language differently than we are used to. For example, whenever we meet someone, they say “you are welcome” to us. I thought it was weird at first, because we say you’re welcome after someone says thank you, but if you think about, the way they use it makes more sense. We met a very friendly, funny guy in Kaduna who greeted us by saying “My name is not MediumMedium, or HiHi, but Lolo.” Lisa and I laughed and he said “She laughs in verses and he laughs in chapters, you two make a good couple.”

The food here has been really good so far and they have the best tea I’ve ever had. I’m going to try to bring some home with me. We had a whole lot of fresh fruits and vegetables dropped off to us today. That made Lisa an extremely happy girl. We sat down and talked to Christian (a guy who works at the university) and he told us that if there is anything we want to eat, we just have to get him the list of ingredients and he’ll get them for us. Hope fully, we can make some food that we eat back in Canada for some of the people here to try out.

We should be able to blog a lot more now that we have internet. Twitter works sometimes here. I think it’s blocked because when I go to Twitter.com, it tells me that this web service is unavailable. I’m working on getting an app that will hopefully work around this.

Well, Lisa is asleep and I should get ready for bed and join her before the power goes out.