This is the flip side of the monthly argument that started here. I suggest that you read it first.
10. Food. When you think about it, there is really nothing so spectacular about Nigerian food that one can’t do without it for a year. Yea, you can call it a case of sour grapes conditioned by inevitability, but this is my story and I’m sticking to it. Give me panini with potato pudding and chicken sauce. On a more serious note, the American continent is filled with a diverse list of amazing cuisines, and I’m glad to share in them.
9. Books. I like the ease with which I can buy books here. It doesn’t make me a fan of paper books over electronic ones, but there are so many paperbacks that are always keepsake materials.
8. People. There is something beautiful in being able to maintain a personal space, individuality, and not worry about a certain crowdiness that is characteristics of so many streets I know. It is a sense of violation from the piercing stares of strangers. I have not had much of that here. There is no pressure to speak to anyone one meets on the road, or share a bus stop with.
7. NEPA. No further comments. #lightupNigeria.
6. Mosquitoes.
5. Family. So many people have gone to great lengths to make me feel so much at home here, and I will definitely miss their warmth and support when it’s time for me to say goodbye.
4. Love. No comments. See #5 above.
3. New Experiences. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine, Winter, Spring, Kwanzaa, Martin Luther King’s Birthday… etc. There are definitely many things to look forward to.
2. Friends. See 5 above. Plus, it seems that I am closer to many of my Nigerian friends now than when I was back home.
1. Well, it’s called a “home”, not a “house”. Home is in the heart, and it goes where the heart is.
PS: Much of this list is tongue-in-cheek anyway. Next month, I’ll tell you a few hostile experiences that I’ve had in Edwardsville that reminded me of how similar people are all over the world, both in goodness and in not-so-goodness. Happy Halloween. See you in November.
(Picture credits: The Cougar Lake “Lantern”, taken from a photo exhibition of sights of SIUE.)
10. Food. There is a certain pain in hearing the words fufu, amala, iyan, gbegiri, ewédú or egúsí from this distance. And no, I will not go into St. Louis just because of them, although once in a while it might be worth it. From now on, I forbid anyone to mention the following words to me in online chats: snail, okú ekó, panla or ponmo. Or akpu, ogbono and afang. All the defaulters will take turns to host me in their houses as soon as I return home.
Considering how much you beat the living shit out of me while we were growing up, even for the filmsiest reasons, 
please consider this form of public greeting a mild recompense for all those fun times. Sorry, the plane ticket to Britain is beyond me at this moment, or I’d have come over to deliver these cards myself* 
. You’re my only brother after all – as far as I know (haha), and it would have been fun to catch up. But heck, have a blast with your family. I wish you the very best on this your special day. May the rest of your days be the best of your days!
The traveller attempts to answer some ten more questions that have either been asked him, or have not been asked yet only because the people who had them in their minds were not too confident about sending him the email!
I did not grow up with computers around me. I am definitely not a first generation internet user. Much of the first creative things I wrote in my life were in long hand on rough sheets of paper, and later on an abandoned typewriter in my father’s lounge. Today there are kids growing up who probably never spent a day without getting on the computer. Whether they are smarter or more efficient than us is beyond me, but I do know that there is some kind of thrill in my current adaptation to a 24hour electronic cycle. The book is dead, I’ve heard, incredulously, and yesterday when I tried to read the current edition of Time magazine in print, I found a certain kind of lazy resistance, and some unexplainable wonder that they still make paper editions of those in this age of the internet. It must be why I spend so much time trying to to finish reading a book of just 300 pages. There’s definitely a sort of taking over by the internet, and I’m surprised to be on the train, considering that my first email address was just ten years ago.
Alton, IL
