ktravula – a travelogue!

A Visit to the Old School

No return visit to the old hall of residence would be complete without a visit to the old rooms that played host to my errant self during those five gruelling years.

So when I went there during the week, I stopped by room A41 where I spent my first year, meeting new people, learning to play chess, and discovering Don Williams.

Then I went to room A52 where I met even more people, ate more food, listened to more music and read more books. The walls of that room is witness to so much history. My last room was D20, and I went there too. I did not go in because the current occupants do not know me and I was not in the mood for introductions.

I also visited the reading rooms, the toilets, the cafeteria and the new basketball court behind the warden’s office. In some way, it was as if I never left. In other ways, it looked like an old prison cell housing a bunch of inmates just waiting to burst loose. There are no monuments to my stay in the hall, fortunately, and I slipped out just as I slipped in, anonymously, taking the memory again with me as I left.

A Visit to the Old School was published on May 29th, 2010, with the tags , , , , under the Academic, adventures category. There are currently 9 comments on this article so far.

Confessions

The Nigerian Blog Awards 2010 have been giving me sleepless nights. Seriously! 😮

I try to think of what else to blog about, and I can’t get it out of my head that I’ve been nominated for the most number of categories in this year’s awards. This is too emotional for me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not averse to awards or honours. I welcome all that they represent and all the responsibility they bestow on the nominee/winners to behave in a particular way worthy of the trust. Still, I was awed, humbled, sometimes swollen-headed, and then humbled again by the what it must mean to be considered worthy of those nominations. Give me the tissue, someone!

So I’ve thanked all the (invisible) people who nominated my blog, but it doesn’t seem enough. I want to go out on a tall building and shout out my appreciation, just go get the point across. Let me do so again here. I appreciate the love. Very much. Thank you. This blog – my own social network, my sounding board, my blackboard, my confession box, and all that it has been over the last ten months – won’t be what it is without the committed readers, commenters, guest-bloggers, fans and friends. It is you for that the drums roll.

KTravula.com was nominated for these categories:

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– Best Daily Read
– Best New Blog
– Best Personal Blog
– Best Photography Blog
– Best Poetry Blog
– Best Student Blog
– Best Travel Blog
– Best Use of Media, Including Social Media
– Best Use of Theme
– Most Intellectual Blog
– Nigerian Blog of the Year

Now I can’t wait for the voting season to come and go (voting starts on 31st and ends on the 6th), so that I can get on with my life and resume the pattern of a sound sleep. This suspense is killing.

In the next couple of days, I hope to try to show you a few of my old posts that I often find myself reading all over again, for different reasons. For visitors coming to this blog for the first time because of the mention in the Award Nominations, the posts might give you an insight into why the blog might actually have possibly deserved those nominations. For old readers, they might refresh your memories. But tell me, what are some of your favourite posts, and why?

PS: Today I took a long overdue tour of my old Hall of Residence in the University of Ibadan. The structures are old but there are traces of renovations. There is also a new basketball court behind the Warden’s office. I took pictures. I will share them shortly.

Confessions was published on May 28th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , under the Soliloquy category. There are currently 9 comments on this article so far.

My University

At my alma mater, the University of Ibadan, earlier today…

Unfortunately, my internet is too slow at the moment for me to be able to put up more photos as I’d have wished.

UI, as we fondly call it, was established in 1948 as an outpost of the University of London. It became Nigeria’s first (and as we like to call it – best) university. It has produced Africa’s first Nobel Laureate (Wole Soyinka, author of Death and the King’s Horseman among several works) and many other giants in other areas of life. Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart was also an alumnus of the University of Ibadan.

Walking though the campus brought back some good memories of the times we spent there. There are now some visible changes on the campus – a statue in front of Queen Elizabeth Hall, a fountain around Alumni Centre and a few other road construction work all around. The administration has been very busy.

My University was published on May 20th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, Observations category. There are currently 5 comments on this article so far.