Browsing the archives for the Fun category.
These are a few random pictures from the Le Claire Festival at Edwardsville Park, yesterday, just by the beautiful fountain lake.
If my computer quits misbehaving, I’d put up some more pictures from the event which included a book fair/cheap book sales, live music, outdoor eating and barbecue, popcorn and exhibition of historical materials, photos and artworks.
Tyto Alba. (Picture Source: Wikipedia)
While living in within the compound of a secondary boarding school in Jos Nigeria in 2005, I had discovered a nest of owls living in the roof of our apartment. The discovery was not really by chance since from the first night spent in the bungalow, we knew that something bigger than a large rat was living in the roof, and they would always make loud noise with their steps especially in the middle of the night. The ladies in the apartment freaked out immediately they found out that what lived there was not a large rat as they had previously thought, but (not one, not two) about three or more large owls. A few days after, we caught one of them by spreading a mosquito net at the opening of the roof through where they had always got in while someone went into the house to hit on the ceiling. After a few knocks that disturbed its sleep, the bird flew out right into the net, and we caught and took him down. Napoleon – a fellow resident of the apartment, and a fellow Youth Corp* member – did most of the job of plucking the most prominent of the bird’s wing feathers, and let him go into the living room. Not being able to fly anymore, he just stood there and stared at everyone suspiciously.
By the next morning, news had spread all around the school and neighbourhood that we had caught an “evil bird” and were keeping it right in our apartment. By evening, it was not the Riyom women alone who were throwing tantrums at our “audacity” and “foolishness”, but the residents of the apartment themselves. The two young women (also in the NYSC programme) who lived in the building with us would not understand nor stand the logic of bringing a scary looking “evil” bird into the house at all where it was bound to become a big physical daylight nightmare. In addition to making sure that their rooms were locked at all times from then on, and they began to whisper “the blood of Jesus” every time they inevitably had to come into the living room, right before they go back into their rooms screaming for us to get the “evil looking thing” out into the woods where it belonged. The bird read the mood of the house and refused to eat any of the rodents we brought for it, or do anything else other than just stare sheepishly. After a few days of immense internal and external pressure, not helped by the bird itself which had started looking weak and tired from non-flying, non-eating and too much daylight, and we had to let it go after a while. It took a few slow steps into the woods behind the apartment and went out of sight as fast as possible. I went online to read about them and found that they were called the African Barn Owl, or TytoAlba – very cool, adorable animals of night. Apparently, not everyone was comfortable with having them near. I confess that at times even I also felt a little chilly when I looked into their large dark eyes. 
Yesterday at midnight, while taking a walk back from campus where I’d gone to see a free show of the movie The Ugly Truth, I found an owl perched on a wire mesh around the Cougar Village tennis court. It was a little larger than the tyto alba but not any less adorable. Luckily I was able to take two shots before it flew away into the woods, which was just as well, since it was perched so high and far beyond the reach of my hands anyway, and the lighting was not good enough to give me a better shot of it.
* The Nigerian National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) is a community service cum paramilitary service mandatory for every fresh university graduate below the age of thirty. It takes each fresh graduate out of their home environment into somewhere else – mostly a farther town within the country, for the period of a year to learn new things, and to serve the community, while living on stipends from the federal government.
I had gone with Chris to the game centre within the Student’s Centre in the University to while away the time, and have fun on some of the game consoles present there. Considering that we had written a class test two days earlier which had sapped all our efforts and energy, the lecturer had given us Wednesday free of class so we felt that we deserved some quality play time which we could spend doing the things we usually won’t get the time to do. In the Gaming Centre were table tennis tables, a bowling alley, plenty billiard boards and a few computer-based games, each requiring an amount of dollars to play.
But in the end, we did not end up having that much time to spare after all since he had to go to another class later in the evening, but for the little time we had, we touched and played everything except bowling which I’d never considered an intelligent form of recreation. When we played pool, I defeated him on all three games, and when we played ping-pong, I defeated him on the only one game we played. But when we got on the computer car racing game, he whooped my butt real nice every one of the three times we played. It was during one of those instances of complete hypnotism and game-cum-dopamin-induced excitement with the speed tracks of the computer game that Chris looked at me and remarked: “You’re becoming American”. And the reason for such a remark was that I had used the words “shit”, “(mother)fucking” and “son-of-a-bitch” one time too many during the intensive race, while lamenting how slow my computer-appointed Chevrolet seemed to be moving.
There is no punch-line to end this one.
Today, I went to the Principia College, Elsah Illinois with two professors from SIUe and another international student from here. Retired Professor Wilson had been invited to give a talk on diversity to a few students in the University, and it turned out to be a nice experience. The campus of the College (called University in Nigeria) is located at a site off the river road and overlooking the great Mississippi River. No words can describe the grandeur of the river as seen from the road while driving. I’m much convinced that it would look and feel so much better while on a bicycle. According to Prof Wilson, Mark Twain the writer used to come over to the river to get inspiration. Oh well.
The journey to Principia took a little over thirty minutes from the SIUe campus, and we had to pass through a few small towns including Alton and Elsah, each with a repertoire of historical information, especially about the Native Americans that made the area their habitation for many years before their forceful dispersal. Alton has the famous Clark Bridge, and the even famous painting of a prehistoric piasa bird on the face of the cliff also overlooking the Mississippi river. According to Wikipedia, Alton has “its steep-sloped streets filled with silos, railroad tracks, and brick commercial buildings”, and it counts among its famous former residents Miles Davies, the legendary trumpeter/musician, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist who was murdered in 1937 for his role in anti-slavery movements (and after whom the Library at SIUe is named), and James Earl Ray, the murderer of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jnr.
One of the notable sights on the way from Edwardsville are the many oil refineries in Illinois that litter the way. “Those refineries refine the crude oil from Nigeria”, the professor quipped “before they are sold in the United States at different rates.” The crude oil is brought from different parts of the world – and indeed from Nigeria – in large ocean vessels, are refined, and sold as “gas”. What he didn’t know until I told him was that the finished petroleum products are also sold back to Nigeria – like chocolate products – at exorbitant prices whenever the steam engines of Nigeria’s refineries go down and the continent’s petroleum giant finds it hard to refine its own products. Passing through those areas of Illinois that I’ve never been before only reminded me of Nigeria’s Niger Delta: plenty smoke in the air, and plenty smell of gas – a depleting environment under serious gas pollution.
The Principia College is an institution for Christian Scientists and it graduated its first products in 1934. The campus is small, yet beautiful. The student population is 490 and from the little we saw, the students are warm, and all find a way of interacting with one another much more than one would find in a large campus as SIU because of the size. An interesting discovery I made was that one in every five students there was an international student. And over seventy percent of those international students are from Kenya. All of a sudden, it felt like if I was back on the campus of Moi University in Kenya again. I still haven’t discovered the reason for this density in Kenyan students population. At SIUe, the international students population is mainly Indian, and then a few others. In 1993,according to Wikipedia, the campus was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior.
The visit ended with a very delicious lunch at the University cafeteria where many of the international students worked as kitchen staff among others. The food also somehow reminded me of my stay in Kenya in 2005. Maybe it was because it was the first time I was eating rice again in a very long time. Luckily, we made it out of the campus early enough to get back to campus so that I was still able to get to class where my students, who had already waited for nine minutes, said that I was indeed lucky by a minute, or I would have met another empty class. Spoiled brats, those kids.
I was once presented by a doting love with a list of several endearment terms from which to choose a specific one for future continuous use. After about a few days of serious thinking I came back with a preferred choice, and she looked at me long and hard, hissed aloud, then wondered aloud why of all the thousand and one “nice and lovely” possible names to choose from – like ‘darling,’ ‘dear,’ ‘love,’ ‘honey’ etc – I had chosen “pumpkin”. To her very bewildered self, this terrible mis-choice only meant one thing: a confirmation of what she had probably long suspected: that I had finally lost all my romantic sensibilities. To me however, it was a very unique expression of my kind of doting which was not meant to conform to popular expectation. Needless to say, the arguments that ensued afterwards ensured that it was not one of the best nights of my romantic life!
Now in Edwardsville, everywhere I look, there are pumpkins on the front porches as symbols of the Halloween season, and almost every American house seems to want to outdo the other in the number of large pink pumpkins placed outside the house and the gardens, each with different artistic designs of scary faces. One could be forgiven to think that the Halloween fairy would be coming down very soon, and would not likely enter the home of the families without those Halloween themed pumpkin plants outiside. Now here’s another startling travula discovery: the pumpkin is the North American distant relative of the Nigerian (water) melon, take it from me. I don’t think we have these kind of large pink plants in West Africa, but we sure do have the melon, and the large water melon, as their distant relatives. And even though we don’t get to have as much artistic fun as do the American families, they always make interesting additions to our eclectic diets. The pumpkin is a very lovely plant, and very adorable too, which is mostly used for decoration but is also often eaten. But if you grew up in Nigeria too, without ever having seen or held one, you might be forgiven for picking a lousy fight over such plant as choice for a love totem. “Honey” always sounds better, notwithstanding the most improbable image of its production process intruding on the imagination, and of bees as anything but synonymous with “endearing”. The first and last time I rode out of my apartment wearing my nice-smelling perfume, I had a dozen of tenacious hungry bees competing for my attention, running with the same demon-speed of my bicycle until I got to the University and finally escaped into the security of the lounge area just to avoid their sting.
It was therefore a mild surprise, on getting back to my apartment this evening, to find that our names on the door have been re-written on pumpkin-themed pink cards by some strange fairies within the University Students Housing system. How very sweet! I can now be sure that whenever the Halloween fairy finally comes by, he’d be sure to knock on our door sometime in the night, even though our own pumpkins plants are just a few inches large.
It was just some time ago last week, when my friend in Edwardsville – the artist – had a wonderful idea: we would sneak around into backyard farms of large and ripe pumpkins plants in town to steal as many as we could so as to decorate our respective houses for Halloween. The thrill of the game, according to her, is to get as many as possible while avoiding getting shot by the farm owners who, living within the compound of the pumpkin farm, might have been immediately alerted by their pets, and who would definitely find us fair game and – needless to say – good target practice materials. Luckily for me, I was quite sober when this divine initiative came to her, so I wasn’t remotely capable of needling it on beyond the realm of just a plain interesting idea that will never ever fly as long as I’m still black, and my good mother at home still goes to her church four to five times a week! By now, you’d have noticed that in spite of my thirst for adventure, I still retain a profound love for (my) life. And despite my present reluctance to commit to this tempting escapade, I still haven’t ruled out showing up on Halloween as a Pirate of the Carribean. It will be up to me to have to live with the shame of parading myself as a pirate even though I lack the guts to do the brave things that the pirates do. Oh well, I will survive THAT one!