A Half Year Coming...Or Not

To recap my accomplishments in the time since I last posted an update: I've visited various African countries, and goldurnit, I made it to Timbuktu. I cannot tell you how much of a hassle this is, especially when your travelling, due to your own idiocy, involves travelling at a time of night in which there are no buses and you have to hitchhike at ridiculously late hours. But seventeen Malians and I will never forget that frigid night we shared the back of a pickup truck doing obscene things to the physical states of our extremities in the middle of the night from Bamako to Segou. And I won't forget sleeping from 3:00 to 6:00 AM on the ground on the road in Segou (if a car hits me, it's a hitchhiking opportunity!). There are two worse occasions when I've found myself sleeping on a floor: in the Pittsburgh Greyhound station with no blankets, and in Pristina, Kosovo, wearing about seven layers, but still frigid in -20 degree temperatures waiting for a connection to Skopje, Macedonia. I was either clever or ballsy in the latter case, as I noticed that the security guard's cubicle had a radiator and decided to park myself there. But I was prepared with my faux Serbian (I'm sure that would have opened doors in a new Albanian country to say) Ja hlodno angielsku smert (Literally: I - cold - English - death).

An interesting fact about Timbuktu is that it is a sister city to Tempe, home of the Lake Havasu City Center for Spring Break Recreational Drug Use and a money laundering scam run by the prince of the Caprivi Strip, Arizona State University. I don't mean to demean the school; I've been to Phoenix a few times and I'm about 85% willing to believe that it actually exists, but from my high school I had one person I know who dropped out with a substance abuse problem and no "friends" on Facebook. That's actually one more than random people I knew from high school who went to UC-Santa Cruz (and one's waiting patiently on my suggestion list), so it doesn't bode well. Mali was the highlight of my trip; although certainly playing on a quizbowl team (it was pub trivia night at a sports bar) in Accra, Ghana, with two Ivorian prostitutes (Yvette and some other Francophone name) was a highlight. We ended up finishing second, which meant no drinks on the house, and an abrupt end to our night, as I hadn't yet determined their "heart of gold" factor and as my life is if nothing else, a constant pursuit for Oscar glory, I didn't go for that. On that subject, I was accosted once by a gal in Dakar, but she gave up when it seemed clear I was pulling a Jackie Maggs (I kid, and I love you bro, both in the Budweiser Super Bowl commercial sense and a deviant way imagining that you are my Master of Ballantrae) was using literature to eschew interaction with a female. I shared a bed with a Gambian woman. She made rice. We didn't copulate.

I didn't have any interactions with foreigners until Ghana, really, save the German fellow who shared the long bus ride with me from Tambacounda, Senegal to Bamako, Mali. And there I was a bit cautious: both because of my presumptions, perhaps inaccurate, that they were doing something related to evangelism, and the fact that by and large they were not my crowd, save a likable Austrian guy who watched the Egypt-Algeria match with me and the subsequent French-Irish match of fame for Thierry Henry's main of Dieu with a bunch of Ghanaian park rangers, who were an enjoyable crowd. I visited the city I have been most utterly frightened of (surprisingly Kumasi, Ghana). I have a tendency to walk around cities at night because it's an important part of travel-night time is when you have the opportunity to view the world without its contingent of sane homeful (making up an adjective for homeless) people. I got threatened with death a couple of times. This didn't happen at night in Accra, Ouagadougou, or Dakar, so I'll consider Kumasi legitimately scary. Dakar had a mix of chaos in which it would have been difficult to pull off violent crime (people sleep all over the downtown streets, so attack me with a knife and I'll just walk a foot and step on somebody and cause a big hullabulloo, and tranquility along the beach.

Perhaps the most obnoxious thing about West Africa is Nollywood. Nollywood is the Nigerian film industry, and it is mind-blowingly awful. Vulgar, excessively violent, loud, your own little river cruise in Xibalba. One of the things I wish would never have been invented is the DVD player, just for the fact that the movies played in various countries are terrible burdens on my auditory senses. To wit, I have seen a low budget comedy called "Mr. Bones" three times in two different countries (Turkey and the Ukraine). It's thoroughly unenjoyable with a plot that I haven't yet understood in my three times that I've watched it. It's extraordinarily racist and awful: the two main characters are a white man, the title character, who is abandoned in the middle of Africa (a la the much better "Jungle 2 Jungle"), and a black golfer who is clearly based on a certain other black golfer pre-sex scandal who shows up in the Bophuthatswanan (I'm not supporting apartheid, I just love the names of the bantustans) resort of Sun City. And I've seen the same obscure Chuck Norris film like three times. It reminds me of how I heard the song Dragostea din Tei in several different countries (Georgia, Albania, little Russia in Tel Aviv, Romania, Turkey and Russia) and wondering what was that catchy song before realizing that it was an actual Internet phenomenon. There unfortunately is no Eastern European equivalent of anime fandom, so we can't share our stories about how the fourth viewing of Mr. Bones is kind of like when you finally appreciate the taste of alcohol for the first time. On that note, back to Nollywood. One thing that struck me was the extraordinary amount of bigotry in those films. In one film I watched, the main characters were all Nigerian gangsters; it was feud between brothers. They all lived in Western style villas with armed guards and SUV's. But, there was comic relief. To my dissatisfaction, it came in the form of anything traditionally African = comedy gold. There was a father-in-law character who was a tribal chieftain; dressed the part, etc. He did hilarious things like falling into swimming pools and changing sides pitifully based on whomever currently had a gun in his face. And then, there was the actual tribesman. Though I do not speak Yoruba or Hausa or Igbo or any of the many languages of Nigeria, it seemed clear to me this man was not talking in a real language, rather he was speaking "hilarious generic native language which is really funny because everybody else in the film speaks pretty good British English and what a putz!" He hilariously couldn't figure out how to use a rifle, and literally one of the characters said, "Can't you speak English, man?" In American cinema, this would be panned as utter racism, although I'm not sure the noble African tribesman portrayed in such classics as the Kevin Bacon vehicle "The Air Up There" is any better. At least my experience with Nollywood was slightly briefer than my awareness of the basketball career of Julius Nwosu (know your mid-90's Celtics).

Of course, any trip to Africa will make one hearken back to the days when a person named Praisegod Barebones could make a mark on history. The use of English nouns with utter disregard for their uncommonness as names is a treat. I somewhat wish the fall of the Mugabe administration just so people like Young Talkmore Nyongani (an Olympian) can get their chance to be honored guests at state dinners. Although there were many stellar examples, some documented on my Facebook account, "The Magic Finger of God Ent." was best in show (Tamale, Ghana). Certainly makes you think which finger is magic exactly. For those of you who know my typing style, you will note that I use the three-fingered system so I have five fingers of use, the two middle fingers on both hands and three others. I miss Yemen for being able to wake up every morning and stick out my middle finger to catch the bus to go to work. And one last standout thing from Africa: I Couchsurfed with two Nigerian wholesalers in a town near Rufisque, Senegal. I was amazed that despite the living conditions (two guys sharing a mattress in a single room, cold water shower for the entire building, squat toilets [which I love]), they owned an obsolete PC that had an Internet connection. And while I sit here in Tunisia in one of the richer countries in Africa, having tried to stream sports games, I have never gotten as good of quality streams as I did that night in a Dakar suburb. Go Senegalese Internet! Bring me my Brett Favre vs. Aaron Rodgers and my live World Series action (thank God it was the two most boring teams that could have faced each other save a Red Sox-Phillies matchup, otherwise I would have been sports starved).

Next up: updates on things in Tunisia. I would state my preference in this Colts-Saints matchup (all right, it's the Saints), but I know Frank Caliendo is going to show up in the Fox studio alone come Super Bowl Sunday doing his John Madden shtick telling us that Brett Favre is still an X-factor, so my loyalties are torn. Sorry, small town in rural Wisconsin which is a smaller market than Spokane, Washington. I don't feel your pain. Rather, I see you with your cheeseheads and envy the living daylights out of you. Some of us have to endure pizza with the foreign equivalent of Kraft Singles. And I'll eat a lot of things, but Kraft Singles are an abomination (I know I'm hitting you where the sun don't shine, Jonathan Magin, but it's true). So, to sum up my Super Bowl feelings: Saints 24, Colts 20. In Frank Caliendo's fantasy world: Brett Favre 138.7, Vikings 45, Colts 0. In John Madden's actual head: the 1997 Green Bay Packers 35, 1997 New England Patriots 21. Boom! Tough actin' Tinactin. I'll give it to you, Caliendo, it is kind of fun.