ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Travelling category.

It’s Your Day, Brother!

scan0016 scan0014 scan0013 scan0012 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!

* Besides, even if I somehow make it through to Heathrow Airport, those buggers at the airport entry points would still take one look at my Nigerian passport as they did the last time I had ambitiously marched towards them (on landing after my connecting flight from Lagos in August) and told them that I wanted to spend my five idle hours on the streets of London shopping, looking at stores, parks, red phone booths and double decked buses , and tell me with the stiffest upper lip I’ve ever seen, that “You hold a Nigerian Passport. We cannot let you in… Yes I see that you have an American visa on it, and a ticket that says you’d be moving from here in five hours, but that’s the law here, thank you… Anything else I can do for you?” Damn them! I wonder how you survive. Here’s what my friend George Orwell the British had to say: “Soon or late the day is coming… (that) the fruitful fields of England shall be trod by beasts alone.” Ah-ha, there you have it. I wish you the best of luck. Happy Birthday Brother!

To Carbondale And Back

These are a few from the pictures I took today on the way to Carbondale and back. I had gone with Reham and a few other student friends for the regional Fulbright get-together/ barbeque and a visit to the African-American Museum on the campus of the Southern Illinois University in the town.

The Carbondale campus of SIU is one of the other campuses of the institution, along with the ones at Alton, East St. Louis and Edwardsville (which are the towns that provide the name/acronym for the University’s periodic newspaper, the Alestle).

Beside a very good tour of the photo exhibition of the African American history of the town, especially their contribution to the coal mining that was the highlight of the town’s development, we also had fun gathering for a very hearty meal. For me, another highlight was being able to drive my Professor’s S-Class Benz on the open highway while coming back to Edwardsville, two hours away.

Let me not forget to mention a notable scramble within the gathered Fulbright scholars (of different genders, countries and scholar categories) to take a picture with the real-life looking cardboard cutting of the President Obama which had happened to find itself in the middle of the exhibition room beside an American flag. Trust me, I didn’t pass up that opportunity myself. I guess the only thing that could beat that is a meeting of the man himself in the flesh sometime soon.

It was a nice day, surely.

Tyto Alba

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.

To Principia

Today, I went to the Principia College, Elsah Illinois with a 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 there is a 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.

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.

How To Be A Stranger

I got a text yesterday from a professor at my University in Ibadan, wondering whether my experience in America has met up with what I expected. I wrote back that the experiences were mixed, but within me, I am convinced that besides the abundance of fast food, traffic lights and sometimes searing cold, I have not seen any major difference in America as a place to live and Nigeria. Okay, maybe that’s likely to be perceived wrongly. I have met with many more interesting people, not any different from the interesting ones I’ve known before. I’ve also met with some strange people, not stranger than the ones I’ve met in Nigeria. However, there is a sense in which everything seems mostly normal, even though different. America is interesting, and so is Nigeria. I can grant that because of its place in the world, I seem to have a front-row to life’s interesting drama when I’m in the US than when I’m in Nigeria, but so far, I have not had any cause to stand in a public square staring in awe at any spectacular sight only because I’ve never seen it before, even though that seem strange enough to the people I tell.

220920091366 Whenever I tell my American friends that I’ve been here for only two months, they immediately ask for my opinion on everything I’ve seen and experienced. And, instead of going with a previously standard response of “Oh it’s nothing. Except for the cold, it’s not much different here from where I’m from,” I now have to go into a long discussion on my very many notable observations, wonder, amazement, dread, lonesomeness and all, just to avoid a long stare or an awkward moment of uncomfortable silence that have now begun to attend any seemingly self-confident response. “It’s okay to feel lonely at times, and miss home, you know.” My classmate had said to me once, and he’s right. I should desist from this present stoic, often impersonal response to this distance, and really break down into my true status as a lost stranger in a distant land. Maybe only then can I find another part of myself necessary for the true experience of travelling. The problem is, it’s not working out for me. I wonder if there’s anything wrong with that.

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