Getting into a Rhythm

This week Rob had a meeting, he has many of course, but in his office they moved one of the chairs to sit on it and oops, a cockroach fell out of the chair and was crawling on his back………..time for fumigation over there!!

When sitting in my car driving around Lagos you see a lot. I get car sick very easily therefore I cannot watch my phone, which is probably a good thing. There’s a lot to see, and it’s not pretty.

One day I saw at different places men with a sewing machine on their head or on one shoulder. I asked Ali what are they doing, or how does that work? Well, it's simple, you can stop them if you need something repaired or sewed. They walk around and are waiting for a job.

What you also sometimes see is a plastic bottle on the roof of a car. This means the car is for sale. When you drive around there is a cacophony of horns/klaxons everywhere around you. Not our drivers, they are trained only to use this when it’s really necessary. They don’t curse or yell, they are extremely calm when they navigate us through this chaotic traffic here in Lagos. I have started with Aqua gym at the Ocean’s Parade Towers, this is our neighbour compound, they have three times a week aqua gym in their pool. I joined them and it was great fun. This is just a perfect way for my shoulder muscles to get stronger again. Due to the fact that most schools in the area havent’s started yet, this means also a lot of mums aren’t back yet. This resulted in having gym with only three ladies in total and unfortunately no music.    

Wednesday Ali and I were on a mission, we were buying pots and plants for our balcony. Yesterday Ali already took me on a tour through Ikoyi to learn what I like and don’t like. I saw beautiful colourful pots, but not many have these pots. We started there where we saw a few colourful ones, we bought 4 sets, these pots are round at the bottom, you need a stand and a little dish to catch the water from the pots. The pots are pretty big, costs per pot after bargaining 4000 Naira (10 Euro).Then our search for nice flowers started. Rob insisted on flowers, but what you see here is a lot of green plants. But when we drove through the streets of Ikoyi and we saw a "nice garden centre". A garden centre is an collection of plants, on the side of a street, so outside, no roof, no door, nothing.

Ali suggested we would go the the one near Banana Island, but I wanted to have a look first before we went to Banana Island. It was bigger then I expected. I found a few things I liked, they’ve put everything in our new pots. For a similar price as the pots I got four plants. I don’t compare things to much with what you pay at home. We are not "at home”, we live here and when it’s more expensive, then that’s too bad. We are very happy with the result. Because we don’t have our furniture yet, we try to make a home of our new home, with the few things you have.

In the evening we had our first tennis training with Kenny. Rob had not played for about 8 years and I'm recovering from my shoulder surgery end of May. We had to start slowly, but it was great playing again! On Thursday I went to the physical therapist at the Nigerian Breweries Clinic to mobilise my shoulder a bit more after my surgery in May. The lady is lovely, the room she’s using is tiny, this means we go inside sideways, because there’s a hospital bed inside and a chair and a side table and a sink with a little mirror, then you sort of stand next to each other against the wall.

Afterwards Ali and I drove with Yinka, our other driver to Maryland, on the main land, to get our rattan sofa and a pouf for the balcony. It’s an interesting place under a high way. There's at least a dozen vendors working and selling their stuff. Unfortunately our sofa wasn’t ready yet, of course not, this is Africa, how could I've thought it would be ready on the agreed time. The fabrics weren’t done yet and they were still working on the pouf, therefore Yinka goes back tomorrow to pick it up.

Friday finally our rattan sofa and pouf arrived and it looks fantastic, but it was still not ready when Yinka came "at the shop". They asked him to come back on Saturday, but he refused,  he stayed there until they had made the fabrics. Now we are extending our furniture with 33%, with only 1 item! We are the proud owners of a dinnertable with chairs. 1 doublebed with sidetables, 1 couchset for the living room, a television set and now a balcony rattan couch set.

The other good news is that we are also making progress with the shipment of our furniture. There is green light to start shipping. Discussion point is that the selected shipping company is the one that ends up in the most difficult terminal in the Lagos Harbour. There are road constructions going on in the harbour and resulting from this our main partner in the harbour informed me that average truckmovement per day per truck is 200 meters!! It takes for the best terminals approx 12 days to get in and out of the harbour. Nigerian Breweries is now helping to find a better solution. To be continued.....

In the weekend we went looking at some art galleries for beautiful African Art. We found some fantastic objects. However we will wait till our furniture is here.