Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Nigeria: Day Four Continued

The rest of the work day was pretty uneventful. I verified that I was screwed as far as a phone was concerned so they recommended that I just buy one and expense it. Well there are not exactly radio shacks around here, so they recommended just getting one off the street. We will see about that. Florence, the admin, brought the list to me, and even helped fill it out. I officially made my break with my boss today as well. He asked me if I was ready to go home around 5, and I told him that I was actually going to stay late because I was going to dinner with a friend. I could see the slight look of disapproval on his face. But all he had to see was ‘have fun’.

After work, I met up with an older gentleman named… let’s say Al. At some point in the night, Al said to me, ‘I want to know if you understand something. What happens in Lagos stays in Lagos.’ This was said after a few drinks, but I will get to that later. So I meet Al in his office and he tells me we are going to a Mexican place named Bottles and that another one of his friends was going to meet us there. Let’s call the friend Bob. So Al is a black guy, Bob a white guy, both of them much older and I all head off to Bottles. Now I had heard of Bottles before, because it is like the high school jukebox joint or Nigeria. Expats tend to go there and meet up after a hard day of work. The popular night is Wednesday when they have their margarita specials. I might have mentioned this in a previous post, but this past Wednesday, the margarita night ran out of margaritas and food (as reported by disgruntled expats). So we arrive at Bottles, and it is a pretty hole-in-the-wall institution. Inside is tackily decorated in Mexican-like wall murals, and sombrero hats tacked to the wall, but it does the job of coming close to replicating Mexico while on another continent. Dinner talk was fun and entertaining, especially as Bob explains his lifestyle of living in Angola. He explains how beautiful the women are (mostly due to the many skin tone variants produced from Portuguese promiscuity with the natives) and how he has a different local flavor for every day of the week. In a slimier looking white guy, I would have thought much less of him, but Bob was pretty cool. And as it turned out, he married one of these chicks. Somehow that made me feel better. So Rob an old guy was clearly a manwhore. But so is Al. So I am out with these two old guys having drinks, and eventually the question is asked by Bob, ‘Where can we go where there are not any ExxonMobil folks’. Now as explained before, Bottles is essentially the ExxonMobil expat hangout. This is around the time where we have went through a pitcher of margaritas, a big bottle of beers, and I have been described as a ‘hard cock’. Not me in particular, but I think they were generalizing about the horny nature of any person of man my age. The statement was dunked in envy and sprinkled with nostalgia. So Al gets the check and we go off into the night.

We end up heading to this place called Michaels, and along the way Al verifies my ability to keep secrets. So we get to this place and it appears to be the typical club setup, a bar, tv’s, people, and prostitutes. Wait a minute… prostitutes! Yes, unless my whoreometer is busted, all but a handful of these women were out to make some money that night. At least I hope so, why else would these gorgeous women be hanging on to some old crusty white guys with ponytails and a bald dome. In short, I had fun, no one hooked up with a prostitute (I think), and there were some nice girls in there that I think were free to talk to. I was afraid to find out though. I met a Nigerian guy who gave me his card and assured me there was a lot of money to be made in Nigeria, but I don’t know whether he is trying to scam me or not. People have been telling me to be wary of people that seem overly friendly, and that’s unfortunate. We ended up calling it a night rather early, around 11 or 12, which was sad because the ‘women’ were getting more and more beautiful by the minute. I got home and decided that I was going to sleep until I could not sleep anymore. And that is what I did.

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