ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the adventures category.

Knowing The Granite City

My first intimation with Scotland beyond the picture of men in “skirts” in glossy magazines must be in the movie “Rundown” where a Scottish pilot kept saying “There are bills on the grind” when he meant that there were bulls on the ground. And then there was Craig Fergusson and a few other guys whose accents just keep you glued to the television because you can’t get enough. In this guest post, my friend and blog commenter Bukola Olawuwo writes about her experience in Aberdeen, Scotland’s third most populous city. It has an estimated population of 210,400 citizens. Enjoy.

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I always had a good laugh in the months before my arrival in Aberdeen when I informed people that I was going to Scotland. Isn’t that the place where men wear skirts? They’d say. I laughed in part because it was funny and because although I knew that men wouldn’t be running around all day in skirts, I too thought of it as “the place where men wear skirts”

It was not the skirt-clad men that grabbed my attention on my arrival though. It was the colours – or lack thereof. Every building was the same colour. Grey. My first thought was that there was a law against paints in this city. I would later learn that many of the city’s buildings constructed between the 18^th and 2oth century were built with granite sourced from the city’s Rubislaw Quarry which is also said to have produced granite for paving streets in London. This earned the city the moniker the Granite City.

Of course, new, painted buildings have sprung up but these are few and far between, creating the impression that all Aberdeen buildings are the same. I for one will never forget the confusion that my inability to differentiate one building from another caused in my first few weeks here. I got lost so many times that I lost count. And I’m clueless with maps, so there goes…

Since I can’t read a map to save my life, I had to depend on people. This was another induction into the city. I found that the Aberdonian accent is a complex one, depending on the indigene’s particular area of origin. It is characterised by harsh R’s and of course there’s Doric. Doric is the local dialect/accent spoken in Aberdeen city and county. It is a variation of English but an advisory warning would probably read “interpreter needed”! My friends and I have had fun trying to decode some of the words amidst thanksgiving that none of our tutors has the acute version of the accent – that wouldn’t have been fun. A personal favourite is the word sorry which if spelled the way it is pronounced could be either “sorree” or “sorrai”, with extra emphasis on the ‘r’. Whereabouts are you going would be “far aboots are ye gaun”; no equals “nae”; house equals “hoose”…and I thought I’d be the one with an accent!

Behind the interesting accents are an equally interesting people. Aberdonians and indeed Scotsmen are very proud; of their culture and heritage. Such is their pride in their region that many are agitating for an independent Scotland; independence that is, from the collective known as the United Kingdom. This pride sometimes makes me feel a pang of shame at the new generation of Nigerian parents who proudly announce that their children don’t speak their native dialect or youths who refuse to wear African fabric. Yes, the men really wear kilts but only for ceremonial purposes and trust me, it takes either national pride or utter madness to wear a kilt in a temperature of minus 16 degrees celsius!

And madness is how the weather feels at times. We’re up North you see, so we have a customised version of the cold that’s a common feature of Scotland – an extremely colder version. And there’s the rain which never pours compared to what we get back home but is a fixture, regardless of the season. I once remarked to someone that I was living for the summer, couldn’t wait to feel warm again. She smiled at me and said “oh summer. In Aberdeen, we rock our sunshades and jackets simultaneously”. Oh well, I’ll survive.

Key to my survival here are the numerous African and Asian shops. They cater to the needs of people like me who’re sceptical about experimenting with food and those who just want to give themselves a treat from ‘home’. I have tried some Scottish food though, my favourite being Pea and Ham soup. My reason for liking it wouldn’t be far from the fact that it tastes a lot like gbegiri with strips of meat in it; only this one is eaten on its own, not with some heavenly amala…(sigh). Haggis, a dish made from sheep’s innards is another favourite. I hear the younger generation don’t quite like it because of the ingredients used and a peculiar traditional method of preparation. Me? I grew up eating delicacies like shaki, ponmo and roundabout – of course I love it! 🙂

Seven months, snow, freezing February and lots of delicious haggis later, I can tell you that my story about Aberdeen has changed – to a large extent. When the day comes that we do not get four different seasons in one day, I just might love it but since the likelihood of that happening is almost zilch, I’ll just say, it’s a lovely place to be or as we say here, nae bad at all 🙂

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Bukola is studying for her masters in Corporate Communication and Public Affairs at the Robert Gordon University Aberdeen. Previous guestposts can be found here.

Thank you very much Bukola. A lovely postcard from KTravula.com is coming your way.

Diana on the VOA

My friend Diana and fellow FLTA speaks to the Voice Of America, here.

Of The Radio Days

I was once a radio presenter, and it was one of the best times of my life.

I had just left secondary (high) school, and I had come across this advertisement on radio asking for interested young person for a radio programme aimed at the youth. I didn’t have so much to do after high school so I jumped at the opportunity, and also because I had so much energy that I just desperately wanted to channel in a creative direction. I was sixteen.

I was also very smallish, but already showing signs of growing. I surely wasn’t as tall as I am now so the first fear was that I would be turned down because of my young looks and voice. It was an unfounded fear because when I got to the broadcasting studio on the day of the oral and practical interview that had us making impromptu broadcasts on radio and television in front of all the judges and other contestants, I found that I was the tallest and one of the oldest of the applicants, and all of a sudden, I had another sudden fear of being turned back because of my height. Eventually, that turned out to be unfounded too. I went into the air conditioned cubicle that I had seen for many years on television (It was where their presenters announced the beginning of each television programme) and read the prepared script. For effect, I even added a few words of mine, and smiled. Time up, next person. After a while, the interview was done, and the over thirty of us young boys and girls were asked to go home and wait for a phone call that will confirm our acceptance.

I got mine a few days later from the producer of the show, a beautiful woman and a veteran broadcaster of the radio station who had trained in England and was married to a famous Nigerian football goalkeeper (now late). She told me that I’d been accepted, and that I should show up on Wednesday to meet with my co-host to prepare a jingle that will be used to promote the show, and get familiar with the broadcasting house. There was a snag though: we would not be paid for our work like normal staff, but we would sometimes be given stipends to cover our transportation. Was I still interested? Yes, I said, and hung up. It was going to be fun to be a radio presenter of a thirty minutes weekly radio show (which was later extended to one hour) on Saturdays.

There were a few other snags along the way, one of which was the lack of a functional record library in the Broadcasting House. The good records have either been lost or stolen and the library had only a few old albums. For contemporary music, we depended on commercial Deejays who demanded that we mentioned their names at the end of every show as their only compensation. For a while, I also stole and borrowed some of my father’s records from his library and returned them afterwards (if I remembered to). It really was fun. My co-host was a young beautiful girl who was then still in secondary school at the time. (The last time I checked on her, she was working in a famous bank in Ibadan). We would meet on Wednesday at the big broadcasting house to rehearse and get our lines right, then later an hour before the show at the FM station to get comfortable and cue CDs and record tracks, then when it was 1.30pm, after the introductory signature tune that was the chorus of We Are The World, our voice would come on: “Hello to you folks out there. You are welcome to Children’s Delight. I am Sola, and with me is Kola…” They later changed the name of the show as well.

Till date, I sometimes get the impression of being considered too old, or sometimes being too young. At the coffee lunch on Monday a few weeks ago with Prof. McClinton, I had told her my age since she thought I was still twenty-five, and she couldn’t believe when I told her that I was a few years older than that. I almost couldn’t believe her either. “Your mannerisms don’t show you as that old,” she said, and I laughed. I agreed too, while also adding, “It could be because I don’t have much of a beard.” Or maybe I am an old man in a young man’s body. Till date, I still also get questions from friends who knew me in those days on the radio. They always wondered why I walked away from it when I entered the University a year after. The fact was that I was actually bored after a while. After up to a year presenting and giving all of myself to it sometimes for free, I was ready to move on. However, I enjoyed every moment of it even though it was becoming too stressful to manage and to combine with a new experience of University life. I also began to consider myself grown up for the themes of the weekly shows. I was moving away from the realm of questions and polemics for the reality of answers and actions. University called. In any case, Sola had a few more months on the show before she adapted it for older youths, and eventually walked away when she went into the University a few years later as well. They were fun times.

Today, I co-hosted a radio show on Blogtalk with Nigerian blogger Vera Ezimora along with two other Nigerian bloggers. It is a two hour weekly web-radio show discussing a general lifestyle topics. This week’s topic was a subject of good fiction: When do you object to someone else’s relationship in light of what secret you know about one of them? Never? Immediately you know? Or, right before “I do”? You can listen to the show here. I enjoyed the discussions and the phone-in contributions, and it reminded me of some of those pleasant days in the cool padded rooms of the FM radio studios in the late 90s. On one of the office boards today in the Broadcasting Corporation in Ibadan is still a copy of a picture of the young me in suit with large headphones on my head, of Sola my co-host and our beautiful brilliant producer in the studio all of us staring at the camera. Good times.

Today…

Was not so boring, because I presented a talk to a group of senior citizens (read grown folks over sixty) along with Reham in an event called Dialogue With Seniors. It was titled “Life in two of Africa’s biggest cities: Ibadan and Cairo.”

I enjoyed it because, contrary to my early apprehensions, they were quite amiable and relaxed. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience of speaking about everything from food to dressing to greeting to customs to religion and to malaria and HIV/AIDS. I showed them a picture of real Nigerian yams, as well as cocoa, both of which they were seeing for the very first time. They had seen Hershey’s, M&Ms and Snickers before, but this was the first time of seeing what cocoa really looked like. They asked questions and I responded. When Reham spoke, I learnt a few new things about Egypt and Arabic as well. It’s funny how much of what we had to say bounced off each other, as well as off the Americans. Cairo is Africa’s largest city while Ibadan is the second largest – by geography. The Nile in Egypt is the longest river in Africa while the Mississippi just close by is the second longest river in the world. (This fact about the Nile has amazed me since I grew up to realize that – contrary to the song we were taught in primary school – the Mississippi was NOT the longest river in the world. I wonder who came up with the song then.)

Yesterday, I participated in a similar seminar, this time for a class of students of English language teaching. Along with visiting scholars from Iran and Azerbaijan, we sat and answered questions about the difference in the University and learning environments in our countries and the United States, where they diverged, and where they were similar, and what we thought each could learn from each other. That was fun too. There were no “high tables”, just chairs. One thing I learnt from that event was that in Iran, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, boys and girls were separated into same-sex high schools and don’t have any form of social interactions until they gain admissions into the University. According to the Iranian speakers, this causes a lot of frustrations when they eventually get into the University and have to engage in social interactions, it becomes awkward. I could almost say the same for Nigeria of a few generations back as well, but not as a result of a government decision or anything. Most parental restrictions on their children (derived from a claimed divine injunction to “train the child in the way he should go”) often result in poorly sociable human beings unleashed on the society.

In all, it has been a wonderful week so far, except for the ugly news of the loss of my files and all my student’s data and academic scores in my now unrecoverable hard drive. Well, the week is just half gone. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

Tuesday!

In bed, reading Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sister’s Street. First impression: A brilliant story. Great writing.

It started this way:

“The world was exactly as it should be. No more and, definitely, no less. She had the love of a good man. A house. And her own money – still new and fresh and the healthiest shade of green – the thought of it buoyed her and gave her a rush that made her hum.”

In Yoruba, that should be:
“Ilé ayé rí gẹgẹ bó se ye kó rí. Kò sí àseju bẹẹni kò sí àìtó. Ifẹ rẹ n jẹun lokan ọdọmọkùnrin ọmọlúàbí kan. Ilé kan. Àti owó tirẹ – tó tuntun yanranyanran pẹlú àwò ewé té rẹwa tó sì jọlọ – rírònú nípa rẹ lásán mú inú re dùn dé ibi wípé ó bẹrẹ sí n kọrin laìlanu.”

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