My First Trip: Day Five

Disclaimer: This is an edited version of my diary from November 2000. Some information contained may be incorrect, and opinions I expressed then are not the opinions of Aaron Rowe in 2006. I have posted it purely for the Novelty value.

Friday 24th November 2000

NO NEPA 3

No NEPA AGAIN! but this time the generator was started at about 6:20 and that was very welcome I can tell you.

Same great breakfast, and a later than usual trip to the office, D..., E..., S..., W... and B....had a meeting to attend this morning so I was to travel with M..., J2... and K1..., who didn't really move until 9. This gave me chance to catch up with the news on the BBC World channel we get. There's digital satellite in the house and BBC world is basically a re-branded version of BBC News 24 so it was all very familiar. The only news was the lack of news from the US Presidential Election fiasco so I didn't really learn much about home. The weather showed that it was still raining though.

I got to the office and D... was nowhere to be seen. I sat at his desk and used his computer to install JBuilder 3 Pro that came on a PC-Plus CD I had brought with me and taught myself to use it but it was so slow to use it was painful. I answered some calls as well and found some of the people completely incapable. K2... phoned, this was the first time we had spoken for a long time, long before I moved into the house in Bristol. He asked me how I was enjoying crazy Lagos. I told him that was the right word to describe it and he laughed. Of course this was all with a 3 or 4 second delay between us and Calgary so it was a bit weird.

Hob Nobbin' in my not so scruffs

In the evening we went to a Canadian-Nigerian Business dinner at Le Meridien EKO HOTEL. Now I didn't really feel part of the group here, I was introduced to lots of people who I didn't know or would ever meet again. There was this Canadian guy who came up to us and asked if we were Canadians too, one person said yes so we were all introduced to this guy as Canadians. Including M..., D... and myself. I get handed this guys business card and the company Name is CANADA and his Job title HIGH COMMISSIONER. Whoah this is a Mad place. He knew all about our upcoming project and sounded quite enthusiastic about it. His name was Ian Ferguson. There was a comedian on hand to relieve the boredom of the necessary speeches from some guy from bombardier aerospace, the company that builds LEAR jets, a Nigerian in charge of the Nigerian air force and this Canadian politician I mentioned earlier.

W..., S... and B... slipped out to catch a plane before we had food, and we said our goodbyes. Then we settled down to our food trying our best to ignore the boring guy going on about Bombardier Aerospace. [Edit: Sorry]

Moving house

Afterwards it was a case of going back to house to set up my stuff. I'd decided to move into one of the rooms vacated by S... and W... so that I could enjoy 24hr electricity, and a short stroll to get to the breakfast table. D... said he would be moving back in here too when he'd sorted out a few deliveries he was expecting to the apartment. D... wanted to go out to work off the stress of that dinner and so did a few other people. I would have been happy enough to stay here and watch telly but they were having none of it.

So we went out for another debauched evening with too much alcohol.

My first night in the main house was a good one. I fell quickly asleep to the soothing sounds of the AC and the generator. I was Alcohol fuelled of course.