Out and about

Finally!
Freedom!!!
With extra exclamation marks!!!!!

Quintin from Video Lounge arranged to pick me up last night and we headed out for a few drinks. Started off at the Lagoon, a complex just past the Civic Centre that has four or five restaurants with bars and a function venue. Mostly run by French Lebanese, very friendly. There's also a sushi restaurant that Quintin reckons puts any in SA to shame. But we were on a drinking mission so after a quick tequila and beer chaser we moved on to the next spot. Bottles is a well known, popular expat pub/Mexican restaurant. For the first 15 minutes or so I was like small town hick transplanted in a busy city; I caught myself gawping at all the white faces!

The food looked very good (although I didn't order as I had already eaten), but a squizz at the menu confirmed that eating out in Lagos is indeed pricey. A steak is around R180, a burger around R100. Starters are areound R60-R80. And this isn't a fancy place. Anyway, we settled down to plenty of beers interspersed with a few more tequilas and enjoyed the buzz. There was a live band - actually pretty good - playing an interesting cross section of covers, from Black Eyed Peas to Abba, The Police and Ryan Adams, all with a reggae disco flavour. Turns out Quintin is a Weskus lad, so we reminisced about cool spots up and down that magical coastline. At one point we were joined by another SA couple and the entire conversation switched to Afrikaans. It struck me that this is possibly the last push of the Great Trek - a diaspora deep into the hinterland. Soon they'll be speaking Die Taal in the Sahara. Eventually, we called it quits and I was whisked back home, pausing only momentarily for the temporary roadblocks that are the local constabulary's way of shaking down people for pin money (you just put on the interior car light so they can see who's in the car, hopefully so that they don't shoot you as you accelerate past them without stopping). I was poured off at the office. My Joburg CEO Sandy and Account manager Erica had arrived from Ghana in the interim and were asleep already (exhausted by a trip that was rerouted and grounded in Benin due to bad weather) so I tiptoed upstairs for a reflective nightcap on my balcony.

Today was a grim lesson in How To Be The Client's Bitch. An ad was due to be placed tomorrow, but was delayed because the client was apparently incacapable of organising the shoot they insisted on taking over from us. Then they changed it at the last minute - they wanted the kids shot on a grass background so we had to comp in the grass. That was just the start. Apparently the detail that the media booked a DPS, not the A4 ad they had approved, was too trivial to notice or mention. Another redesign. It ended up that my Senior Art Director had to take an okada (kamikaze motorcycle taxi) to deliver material, the traffic being too congested for driver Halim to take the 4X4. Upon his arrival, the client decided that the grass was not to his liking; he wanted to drop in his own lawn. So now it was my junior copywriter's turn to take the open working files - and his life - in hand and chase after my AD on another okada. You want a nicer lawn? Sod off! (In fairness, when I saw the lawn we had supplied, I had to agree with the client; it looked like a yellow and green patchwork. It occurred to me that my designer had no actual point of reference - you don't see any lawns in Lagos, so any unbroken patch of green grass would be considered fair game)

After all the panic, I was less than thrilled to receive a call around 8pm informing me that on Monday I will be required to present all the work we have done to date to the Chairman. Besides the fact that Monday is a public holiday (Democracy Day - their 12th Anniversary), I have been counting the sleeps till my flight back to Jozi tomorrow night. So, now I'll have to see... If I can confirm that Richard will be back in Lagos in time to handle the presentation, I'll fly out as planned and paid for; If not, I'll be stuck here till next Tuesday. I will only know by noon tomorrow. Hold thumbs!

 Continuing my mind bogglingly exciting voyage of discovery in the kitchen, the green spiky heart-shaped fruit that had me baffled turned out to be a kind of feral cousin of the mango, called fuko'fuko. Possibly, the name is derived from the first question posed by pioneer English speaking missionaries in these parts, i.e. "What the fuck is that?" It's very juicy and quite refreshing, the fibrous sticky white flesh more tart than sour, although it has large black seeds dotted throughout, like rounded watermelon pips, that you need to pick (or spit) out.

The rough, hairy looking brown root thingy [below] is the humble, but highly celebrated yam. Besides featuring in Popeye's signature song (I yam, I yam) it's one of the staple foods of central and west Africa and it occurs abundantly in sixth grade geography text books and crossword puzzles.