ktravula – a travelogue!

reflections on the world

Snow, Swooning & Swimming

Here are some more random pictures taken in/of the snow that has now made it a habit to come down everyday, covering everything that moves or doesn’t. It has even made it difficult for me to attempt to walk on my ktravulake now. The white is quite suspicious. Nobody knows what is underneath, or how frozen hard it is. I don’t want to walk to the centre only to fall in. It is so white that if I fall inside, nobody will know what had just happened. Anyway, here are pictures.

The other set of pictures were the ones I took when I went swimming with Ben yesterday at the University pool. The University pool is three feet deep on one end, and thirteen feet deep on the other. The last time I swam was many years ago, in the pool at my University in Ibadan, and I am finding out happily that I have not lost much of my skills after all. It took a little while more than necessary to warm up, of course, but when I finally did, I was able to swim the whole length of the pool back and forth for a few times. Ben, on the other hand – who had been going to the pool at least twice every week since school started – didn’t have any problems going back and forth many more times without stopping. He also had more speed. Well, what can I say, I need more practice. Hmm, I am exercising editorial discretion by not showing you the full frontal shot I took while I was in only shorts. I’m afraid of lawsuits that might result from swooning and fainting ladies in many parts of the world where they read my blog and see my pictures. :D Sorry!

Those pictures were taken by Mafoya who went with us but was too lazy, or afraid, to get into the water and learn some skills. The water was warm (81 degrees F or 27 degrees C). The hardest part of the trip was the walking to and from the gym in the freezing harsh snowy stormy weather. But we were three, and we made it through warm clothings, jokes and banter, and songs.

Needless to say, if I ever find myself on a capsizing boat, I am fit enough now to save myself, and at least one beautiful damsel.

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Frozen!

The lake is frozen. The waters are frozen. The land is frozen. My hands are frozen. Everything is dead. It is winter.

Today I walked on water, almost like Jesus did. Only this time, it was day, and the water was no water after all. It was ice. I walked on a frozen lake. I almost gave in to the temptation to ride on it as well. Who knows, I might still give it a try. My friends in the mountains of Colorado have had snow since October. They have ice rinks up in Chicago for skating and ice hockey. I have the Cougar Lake in its frozen glory. I may not be able to skate on it, but slide I shall with my winter boots. It’s my own winter sport, invented and patented by KTravulad himself. We shall rename this spot, this water, the KTravulake.

But I pity the ducks, the geese. They have now been confined to the sky since their primary playground has become a plate of solid glass. I don’t envy them, and I pity them only a little as well, since I was never a fan of their loud cackling in the first place.

In any case, it is winter. I’m enjoying it.

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Winter

The snow today was more than that of Friday in that it was more than two inches high on the ground. Like Friday, I had no idea how and when it started, but I found it on the ground when I pulled apart the curtains in my room. What I did next was unthinkable, as usual. I got into thick clothing, got on my bike and rode into campus to take pictures. Luckily, the sun was still out and my new gloves were comfortable enough to hold the camera with. Anyway, these are the photos from that eventful ride. Let those who said that I won’t be able to ride my bike in the snow/winter show themselves right now. My message for them comes from that famous two-word response from the South Carolina senator. No I won’t repeat it here. :D

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It Gets Freaky Now

IMG_1256At five o’clock this evening, I had stepped out of Aldi’s to wait for the bus to take me to campus, and then I looked up into the sky. Actually, I didn’t have to look up into the sky because everywhere around me already showed what had given me the kind of unexpected dread: it was very dark. It was not just an evening dark, but a  pitch black appearance of night. I looked at my watch, and it was still five o’clock. For a moment, I thought that my watch had stopped, I had missed the bus, and I was stranded again in town, especially since everyone seemed to observe me with some kind of suppressed amusement as I stood at the bus stop. Actually, they were not looking at me. I have now classed it with the same standard response of momentary notice that I get every time I find myself standing in a public place, especially alone, and carrying two bags of groceries.

The point of this post however is to lament this strange darkening which I have heard about and have come to expect as a consequence of the new season of shorter daylight. I have not however been able to wrap my head around it. Whenever day begins to start one hour late, and nightfall then begins at five in the evening, it comes with a certain nervousness for which I’m not prepared. Oh, where is the comforting bosom?

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Notes to Self

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#1. There is nothing sinister about the fact that there was power outage, and a serious fire outbreak in house #529 of Cougar Village, on the same day of your arrival in house #431. Cast the superstitious devil out of your dirty mind, all your friends’.

#2. Stop worrying about the absence of bones in the American fried chickens. See, you’re no more in Nigeria, and there’s nothing wrong in eating a boneless fried chicken. Seek calcium from some other sources. By some miracle of cooking, Americans have long devised their way to prepare their fried chicken without its bones. Their dogs must eat something, after all.

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#3. There must be a special reason why this post, and this one, are the most read on this blog. Your Nigerian readers must be fascinated by the fact that their biggest assumptions could as well be wrong. But why did they not read much of this one? Could it be that they care much less about foreign food, considering that they have become insular in their culinary preferences?

#4. Do your winter shopping for hats, gloves, boots, mufflers, shawls and overcoats latest by the middle of September. You don’t want to have your toes fall off when it gets as cold as the inside of a Fan Ice freezer. Prepare a good part of your savings for buying hot Starbucks coffee. Don’t forget to buy some ogogoro as well. Nothing is too small to fight against the midwestern cold when it comes. Don’t leave anything to chance.

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#5. You are a teacher here, and not a student like everybody else. Hold yourself high. Be disciplined. Put all your enthusiasm to work, and you just might pull this off nicely. All you have is this one year to make a good first impression. It’s just like the NYSC. You survived that one, right? And in that particular case, it was in a mixed secondary boarding school without internet, cafeteria, school bus, to-borrow bookstores, warm bath, pretty lake and an attractive stipend, situated in the middle of nowhere, and where students spoke a combination of Hausa, Berom and crooked pidgin slang.

#6. Buy a bicycle, preferably not at Wal-mart. Buy a basketball. Like many people say, don’t waste your talent. See if you can make a college career in basketball, if only for the fun feeling you get from the company of other players. Put your height to advantage, but don’t beat them too much. They might get jealous.

#7. Stop expecting your roommate to know who Halle Berry is when you tell him about the movie “Monster’s Ball”. He is an undergraduate of Pharmacy, not Theatre. And he’s from Illinois, not California. After all, not all Nigerians know who Fathia Balogun or Lola Idije are.

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#8. Deal with time zones already. When you were in Providence, you were five hours away from home. Now at Edwardsville, it is a six hours gap, and you may not call home thinking you still exist in the same longitude.

#9. Get used to seeing women drive the buses that take you to and from campus everyday. You are no longer in Nigeria.

#10. Enjoy yourself. Visit that lake more often. Go to town more often. Take long walks. Ride around town. Ride to St. Louis. Get lost, wander around, and find your way back when it’s dark, with sweat marks on your brow and a very exhilarating feeling in your belly. Visit Boston again, this time not just the airport. Visit New York, Broadway. Take pictures at the National Mall when you’re in Washington DC in December. And at the Lincoln Memorial. Fall in love. Tease. Rock the silent woods in your own little way, and let it fill you with its bubbling life. You are in the United States of America.

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