Monday, October 18, 2004

Cotonou

It started at the Kuramo beach in Lagos (Bunmi, Kenny[me], Dapo, Essien and Dele). Now Bunmi opted to take a seat where there is this elite African band and girls dancing with “Semi-Detached” waists. The scene was lovely with Microsoft office in the Octagon building standing tall in the nightline across the Lagos lagoon.
The next stop for the night was this dance all club in Lagos where we partied till dawn (details withheld). Here Essien is the toast of the day with his “bone-less” maneuvers We headed back to Festac under Dapo’s piloting, grabbed a few hours sleep and we were up again discussing technologies, Splashers migrating to Abeokuta, the night and so on.

Now it’s about 10 o’clock in the morning; Demola and Bunmi heads for Abeokuta while I started a journey alongside Essien to Cotonou in neighboring Republic Du Benin for the second day of this exiting weekend.
On arrival at the “Marche Dan Topa” in francophone Benin, we took a walk round town. Now Topa is Lagos with a fifth of its population. Sweet girls riding on mini “Harley Davidsons” are a site to behold traffic is light. Friendly people, we concluded they were having too much fun in Benin.
Now Essien’s elementary French was beginning to falter in the face of competition, his sweetest phrase was “mon Françoise des deficille” meaning exactly what you think; still we were able to cross many language barriers with wild gesticulations and bad French and sometimes we meet guys who speak Yoruba and English.
Now to the really exiting part, we walk into this restaurant called “LA PENICHE” where we meet these 2 girls…Arshelle and Plazon…(I couldn’t figure out the second name). Now Arshelle is truly exotic and Plazon starts exaggerating her catwalk to catch Essien’s attention, Arshelle having already caught mine. Somehow we were able to place orders with a mixture of Essien’s flavor of French and sign language, the girls were both understanding and helpful. We placed our orders from leader bound menus and settled for this meal called “ Daurades Guillees avec soup de poisson ” 3500 F apiece The waiting begins.

5 minutes, 10, 15, 20 minutes, finally the meal arrives and it was awesome!, well worth the wait Although the meal looks to good to be eaten, the poisson (Fish) was survived by its head, ribs and tail, I got Arshelle number and Essien made them know we’ll be visiting again soon. And God! Was it cool, I can’t wait to get a break and go back to my exotic “propriété de unadulterated aussi belle femme avec le coup masculin de foudre”.

How I wish my worst weekends were like this., by the way, Arshelle speaks only French and Fon, so I better start working on my languages…

No comments: