The First Day

On Sunday 29th of July we officialy started our ‘Nigeria Life’.

The taxi arrived at our house in the Netherlands and started loading the 9 suitcases and our Max Verstappen Painting. Max was packed in a foam tube of 1.60 m long and 8 cm wide. When checking in it turned out that the 9th suitcase was still to be added for a bargain price of 200€…. So we went for some coffee and tea and the whole day looked promising. We had 2,5 hours change over time at Charles De Gaulle, what could go wrong? Exactly when everybody was on board our Air France plane all luggage was deboarded again. Reason was that it was discovered that one of our fellow passengers had packed a gasbottle in his luggage. So we arrived with more than 2 hours delay at Charles De Gaulle and boarding had already started for the connecting flight with Air France to Lagos. So no Café au Lait with a croissant at the airport but running to make it. We did but we were worried about our suitcases. Max stayed the whole trip with us in the overhead baggage compartment. We discovered that the plane was operated by Air Belgium – we did not know this existed-.

When we arrived in Lagos we had to do all formalities of entering the country. It was my 4th trip to Lagos and all 4 times the process was different. Then the waiting for our suitcases started. 8 out of our 9 suitcases were received quickly, however up to now the 9th suitcase is still missing.

We are staying in the Radisson in Lagos. The reason is that Joep Peeters is working for Radisson and would introduce us to the General Manager here. When we woke up on Monday we received a message that the GM of Radisson Lagos was looking for us but could not find us. So I went to the reception and asked them to contact the General Manager that we were there. The lady at the reception reacted a bit strange but called him. Nothing happened and nobody showed up. Half an hour later we checked out and the receptionist asked me if we were leaving already. When I confirmed she asked us to wait and then the Sales Manager showed up. He gave me his business card, was very interested in us, what we were doing, if we would come back again, if not sleeping then for drinks or dinner. "Of course", we said! Some hours later we got a new message from Joep: Apparently Radisson has 2 hotels in Lagos and we were at the other one. Thank you Joep!

We arrived at Bella Vista Towers on Banana Island with our luggage and were introduced to the facility manager. He asked our nationality and we told him we were Dutch. He said there is another Dutch Family in our Building and than he said no sorry not anymore. The guy killed his wife and child and is now in jail in Nigeria. We thanked the manager for this great introduction story. Probably he also thought that it was not the smartest introduction. So when he was showing us the premises he said. ‘I now recall, the other family was not Dutch but is Irish’.

And then the great moment was there we entered our apartment and were looking forward to see with what kind of furniture the house was decorated. We were also looking forward to see Glory, Ali and Yinka. To our big surprise the house was empty and nobody was there. I started to make some phonecalls and things started moving. After some time every 10 minutes somebody entered. Glory our Nanny came in a fantastic orange shirt with a red-white-blue heart on it. Ali one of our drivers arrived. Grace the lady that coordinated the rental of the house came. The landlord representative came, 4 construction workers came and managed to fix with the 4 of them for a big part of the day the ceiling in one of the toilets. Most of the time they were all 4 in the bathroom of approx. 2m2. A carpenter came to fix a door. The airconditioning guy came to check the air-conditions. At the end of the day the moving company started to deliver some furniture from one of the brewery guesthouses. Then a cleaning team of 1 came to clean all night the apartment.

In the mean time we went out to buy a new fridge and washing machine. I thought we might negotiate the price but this was refused. It was clearly stated that it was fixed price and not negotiable. After leaving and nobody calling us back we went back in again and paid the (too high) price. Then we went to another Mall for all kind of other stuff and to our surprise we were given without asking a discount. But I needed to receive the explanation of the discount separately with the message that I needed to remember who had organised the discount

and that she now expected a token of our appreciation as well. There is still a lot we need to learn about shopping in Lagos.

In summary it was a great first day. Exactly how we could have imagined it. We finally have now a 2 person bed, a minimal working desk of less 1 m2, 2 sofas, 2 chairs, a small table, a dining table and 6 chairs. We feel like kings. But it was difficult to fit this all into our 350m2 penthouse.;-)