Lost luggage!!

It all happened when I arrived back in Belgium. I’d just spent 36 grueling hours on planes and in airports, getting back from Buenos Aires to Brussels and everything had gone smoothly, except for the unsettling fact that all the goodies I’d bought in the tax free in Argentina where taken out of my hand luggage and thrown into a big garbage bin upon arrival in Portugal. The security woman who did it, did so with a blank face but I know she was only too happy, anticipating how after I’d gone, she’d be able to fish them out of the bin and take home all those expensive crèmes (Kiehls’, la prairie, Shisheido). When I protested loudly, saying I was in transit and had only just bought them in a previous airport, she replied with a wry smile that I’d arrived in Portugal, where I could not bring anything in from outside Europe, basta!

As for the crèmes, let me tell you that it was the first time in my life I’d ever spent any money on crèmes. Most of my friends have loads of them and keep telling me how great they are. So this time, looking for a way to pass the time in the airport, I’d decided to get some. But now that this Portuguese woman had taken them all, I thought of my mum and decided to stick to her policy, which is to keep things simple: a splash of cold water and a bit of Nivea. And she may not be too wrong because everybody keeps telling me how good she still looks at 75.

Anyway, wanting to keep things simple, upon arriving in Brussels with loads of accompanying luggage , I decided to check them into a locker so that I could have my hands free to frolick around and get some shopping done before returning to Africa. After all, I’d had great expectations for shopping in Brazil and Argentina, but prices had been both shocking and choking. So now that I was in Brussels, I had to make up for that, as fast as possible. So I checked my two huge bags in and went downtown. Hours later, when I had to retrieve my luggage in order to check in for my flight to Abidjan, standing in front of the lockers I suddenly noticed that I’d lost the little piece of paper with which I was to get the automate to open up my locker. I turned my pockets inside out, a dozen times, but no luck, I’d lost the ticket. Mama mia! What was I to do?

A bit nervous, I started dialing the number advertised next to the lockers ‘in case of emergency’. The phone rang and rang, but on the other hand no one seemed interested to pick up the phone. Now what was I going to do? Leave the locker-room and just check in my hand luggage and retrieve my big bags upon my next trip to Brussels, in five months time? No, I couldn’t do that; I needed to find someone to help me. While I kept looking around frantically, a tall skinny man showed up in a uniform. When I asked if he could help me, he looked a bit puzzled. I explained him how I’d lost my ticket which had on it the number of the locker where I’d put my stuff, and a special code to open this Ali Baba’s cave. I described him that I’d forgotten the number of the locker, but that I’d put my stuff in an upper locker, vividly remembering how the ones on the ground had been full and how hard it had been to lift my heavy bags up into an upper locker.

The man kept asking me patiently where I thought I might have stored it. “Which locker do you think my dear, the one up here? Or the one next to it?”
I kept biting my lips, wondering where on earth I’d stuck my stuff but I could hardly remember anything, only that it had been in the upper compartment.
The man opened up all the upper lockers, one by one. There were about thirty of them, and it was a tedious job --he had to give in lots of numbers into the machine and often got the combinations wrong and had to start all over again. Every single locker took at least three minutes to swing open, and when that happened I was not allowed to look while he peeked inside, as I might be tempted to point and say ‘Yes, there it is, that’s mine’, whenever there was a Louis Vuiton bag or a Gucci suitcase in there. So I’d had to tell him what my luggage looked like (a plain red bag and a blue one), and each time when he’d opened a locker and peeked inside, he just turned around to face me and shook his head, “Nope, that wasn’t it.”

With each opened locker my courage sank deeper into the ground and both of us got closer to the thought that I might have lost the paper in front of the locker and that someone else had run off with it. “I’ll open up till the end of the row, but if by then we can’t find it, I will have to take you to the police office to hand in a declaration of theft” the man said.
He opened another one, and again he shook his head. Meanwhile I tried to recall the evening I’d packed my bags and my mind started scanning what exactly I had put in there. Because all of that was gone now, someone else was going to enjoy it. Bye cowhides, bye art works, bye books, bye handicrafts, bye posters, bye little robot, bye old red telephone, bye clothes, bye shoes, bye swimsuit, bye all the havaianas gifts… Bye bye to everything!
Just when I was thinking how sad it all was, the man suddenly asked “Shall we try the lockers on the ground floor?” At first I thought it was useless to do so, hadn’t I dragged the bags up in the air and remembered those movements so vividly? So why bother looking? Also, my time to catch the plane was running out, I really had to hurry up.
Because I was so hesitant, the man was not sure what to do either and decided to call his boss for advice. “Just open them one by one, make sure to check them all’, was the answer. And so he started opening each and every one of them again, the upper ones, and after that also the ones on the ground floor. And guess what? When number 14 flung open, the man turned around and looked at me “What about that, a blue and a red bag, couldn’t that be yours?”
When I stepped closer to have a look inside that locker and saw my bags, the two of them, safe and sound, I spontaneously jumped into the man’s arms. The weight and the surprise of it all almost threw the poor man to the floor, but he told me not to worry, it was his first day on the job and he was as happy as I was.

As for me, I was too happy to be embarrassed. I’d just gotten all my stuff back, and felt richer than ever before. It felt outrageous to get both of them back- I would already have been too happy to just get one of them.

Maybe you should experience that too, to have your stuff ‘disappear’, and then magically turn up. There’s no better way to appreciate what you have and make you smile all day! (A smile that is only overshadowed by my concern about what I call my ‘early stages of dementia’, because how could I so vividly remember something that clearly never took place? Aye caramba! Of course, my friends will just laugh it off, but I am really worried…)

THE END
PS- As usual, whenever you think that you overcame a hurdle, it turns out that it was only the beginning, and a benign one in comparison with what was to come. In this case, when I checked in, with my luggage!, I was told that my name was not on the list. Seemed that someone had cancelled my booking. Ahum! Luckily the flight wasn’t full and they managed to find me a seat.
Then, when you have to pass the security people, they this time did not take any of my liquids, they were by now all in the bathroom of that Portuguese woman, but it was my laptop that they wanted to take this time. They could not explain me why, but something was wrong with it. They slowly passed it back through the scanner, again and again, and just when I was about to throw a fit, or get an epileptic attack, the man at the scanner shrugged his shoulders and said ‘go ahead, you can take it.’

And that’s how I finally ended up on the plane and got to know my neighbor, a young French girl travelling to Ivory Coast to meet up with her new love, a French soldier, but that’s another story.

Bye bye!

Griet

travels in the land of Carnaval- part II- RIO

After Sao Paulo there was Rio which meant carnaval with a huge defile in the sambadrome, all night, and with many many streetparties (blocos) for several days, all of which needed lots of stamina and I keep wondering how they did it, is it the acai juice, the matte, the farofa??? One thing is sure, they do know how to party and seem to have a never ending tolerance for samba dancing (which can go on for hours and hours). Another remarkable thing was the often great sense of humor and creativity displayed in their costumes. These characteristics make them a most wonderful people, I would not mind if one of my daughters comes home with such a creature (in ten years time, that is, they're only nine years old right now!)

Anyway, once carnaval was over, the Brazilians could start 2012 like all the rest of us had already done weeks earlier. Life went back to normal and there was time to visit the beaches and other great sights in this, it has to be said, magnificent city. Mountains, lush vegetation, a big lake, beaches all around... you name it, Rio has it.
What it also has:
-crazy chauffeurs (bus, taxi)
- lots of police everywhere (which is very reassuring, also the fact that a lot of favellas have been 'pacified')
-a truly mixed population (in that you can have the looks from Asia, India, Caucasia, Africa all next to each other)
-great fresh fruit juices on each and every corner
-caipirinhas and cachaca in each and every bar
-a lot of sun so that whilst at the beach one has to be careful because before you know it you look like a toast - a golden one after 30 minutes, a brown one after one hour and a very black burnt one after only two hours!
-besides the sun one finds at the beaches heaps of bare buttocks (just like you see the women of the 'indigenous population ‘dressed in the museu do indio- a lovely museum but such a pity that they don't let you buy the beautiful artifacts straight from the museum!)
-so as I said, heaps of bare buttocks on the beaches, in all shapes and sizes, but not one single bare breast. The idea of being topless for them is apparently very shocking, and only to be condoned during carnaval when there's a lot of body paint over it.
-besides the bare buttocks, lots of people are wearing braces. Not the young ones, but the ones in their thirties and older. I wonder if that is a fashion accessory here, who knows. In any case it must be good news for the dentists.
-Talking about dentists, maybe I’ll have to re-school myself so that I can come live here... Or maybe it will just be easier to hope that, if there's such a thing as an afterlife, I'll come back as a Brazilian. A Brazilian with money, that is, because it's certainly no bargain over here!!

END

PS- For my friends from Antwerp: those 'blocos' parties resemble very much the 'beiaard concerten', in that there's a gathering of a huge crowd of friends. Only difference is that in this case there will be a band playing samba all evening, and the people will be dancing the samba all evening, and they will fuel their sore legs with caipirinhas and will be dressed in some funny outfit, but for the rest they will be talking and laughing and gossiping just like at the beiaardconcerten. Voila!

Last night I witnessed the weirdest spectacle ever. Weirder than what I’d observed somewhere in the mountains in Japan with a seemingly drunken Japanese Shinto priest or at a Bhagwan meeting in Denmark.

No, this was something different all together. Candomble, it was called. A bunch of white men and women, sixty of them and maybe two Africans, all dressed in white robes with lace frills that made them look seven times bigger (fatter), and the men often with what looked like a sheet draped over them and skinny white pants underneath, decorated with bracelets of woven straw on which cowries where attached, a white cloth draped around the women’s head, the men often with something resembling a surgeon’s head wear, lots of colorful items attached to their waist belts, some with a string of goat teeth around their necks … these people all throwing themselves, in turn, on the floor in front of their gods and goddesses, dancing around to the sound of drums and their own songs, whilst a woman went around carrying a pot of fumes that smelt very much like marihuana, which might have explained some of the even weirder dancing that followed, as if they tried to imitate the swiveling dervish, and then some other woman pouring a liquid on all those disciples heads, but that did not seem to calm them down much. Anyway, it looked like a circus, or maybe more accurately, a bunch of old hippies gone mad.

After this ‘religious ceremony’ the different reincarnations of deities could call you and give you advice or just energy. I got the latest, from a trembling rather young man whose very warm hands slid over my shoulders and my back, who put rose petals on my neck and kept shivering and trembling while massaging my hands and uttering things in Portuguese of which the last part got translated to me, and said that I ought to put that very rose petal under my cushion for a week and, I assume, that life will be great ever after.

Well, to tell the truth, life is pretty great right now. I guess I was born to just wander around. Whenever I am in airports or on planes, I just feel so very happy, so filled with possibilities that a wide grin shows up. I suddenly feel like the plastic cover around me has been taken off and I can breathe freely. I remember being in an airport in Europe once to take a flight to a place not so far away, but passing by all the other boarding rooms and watching the signs and being so jealous of the ones sitting in the room that said ‘Shanghai’ or ‘Tokyo’ or ‘Rio de Janeiro’. Oh, if I could just walk into one of those rooms and get one of those planes! This time I just did it, I got on the plane to Brazil. Whilst sitting in that boarding room this time, I had expected that half the passengers would be black, or at least some creamy color (I’d promised my girl friends to bring one gorgeous bronze one for each of them!) But it wasn’t. White people only, the whole plane load. My neighbor, who turned out to be a Brazilian vegetable garden enthusiast living in Bristol (whose garden yielded more than 65 different fruits and vegetables last year, with Jamie Olivier filming it and using its produce in his cooking shows), well, this neighbor, who after eleven hours chatting felt like a brother I’d known all my life, showed me a book which said that the whole of Brazil has only 6 percent of African population, and about 30% mixed but the greater majority being white. So I don’t know why I had this impression that it would be mixed like in Cuba…

Here in San Paulo, where I’ve started the journey, you’ll be lucky to spot one African in the street, and in the buildings they are the cleaners, not the residents. Also, another mystery is the impression I had that all Brazilians were good-looking goddesses. What I see here on the street would fit more my idea of the East German population, a few decades ago! With the only difference that every single one of them seems to wear at least one tattoo (and I doubt whether that was the case in East Germany). Also, another difference is that people here talk about carnival all the time -- it seems that their year, their job, their life will only start after the carnival.

Anyway, people tell me it’s good that I’ll be heading to Rio too, that there I’ll see more of what I had been expecting. Let’s see!

Meanwhile it has to be said that the there’s a great offer of food from all over the world, especially a lot of Japanese, and it’s of great quality and easily found. There are coffee shops on every corner of the street and the people are very friendly. When you start talking to someone they are very welcoming, nobody asks you if you are from the police, as people in Belgium ask me on occasion, like when I sit next to someone in the bus or the doctor’s waiting room and start to chat with them.

And the Brazilians are great with plastic. You’ve heard of the haivananas success, those flip-flops in all sizes and colors. Well, another great success are their Melissa shoes, stylish plastic shoes in all sizes and colors. I’ll go and try on some today, ole!

END

January is the longest month

The other night we were sixteen women in a tiny place, called "Chez Christy- Salon de Beauté”, having our hair done -- which for Africans means taking off their wig and getting some parts of real or fake hair (real from India, fake from China) sewn into their short cropped own hair. In fact, you don't see too many scissors at an African hair salon, rather heaps of needles and thread, and a smoking machine that looks like a waffle maker. No waffles in there, but some pieces of iron that get very hot and will straighten or curl any piece of hair you put in it.

I have to say that I love watching it all because when it's well done, I barely can tell that a woman is wearing a wig. So when she walks in, sits down with a plop and then with one movement brushes it off and reveals a rather bald looking head, I am pretty shocked. And then, a few hours later, she will walk out with an Asian look - long straight black hair, for example, or something else all together. Anyway, a completely different look from the one she walked in with. In fact, I often have trouble recognizing my female colleagues because every Monday they walk in with a totally different style - they can be suddenly a Cleopatra, or a wild tigress or a punk or... It's endless, you should come see for yourself!

So there we were, all 16 of us, half staff and half clients, getting their hair done, their nails polished or their feet scrubbed, when suddenly a man knocked on the door. He looked middle aged and rather well dressed, not a masked bandit with a rifle or machete. However, the salon owner told her staff to keep the door locked and not let him in, because that's how the thieves operated these days, she said, when holdups where all too common now that everyone was trying to find some money to get through the month of January, which they say is the longest, after all the money has been spent on the year end festivities.

We just sat there, wondering what we had in our purses and how bad it would be to lose them. The man at the door however was not willing to go away and tried to make the girl open the door. I felt like one of those goats in the fairy tale where the wolf comes knocking on the door and they go and hide in the tall clock. Looking around I could not see any clock, just a few tiny cupboards, barely enough to hide a pint-sized- dwarf.

The man kept gesturing to be let in. The owner stood up and made a NO sign. The man peeked through the glass door, trying to get a better look of who was inside. I suddenly stood up and did the Japanese sign for NO, like I'd once seen in a Toyota add. I'm not sure if he understood that, he might have thought that me, the only white there, meant to slit his throat. Or more likely, that he might get in trouble when a white is involved. Anyway, he turned around and walked away.

I can't tell you how relieved we all were, though for a while we were sure that he was just hiding behind a car and might try to slip in as soon as we needed to open the door to let a customer out. But after half an hour, when he had not shown up again, we started to relax.

Meanwhile the staff continued sewing and braiding, some clients can sit there for up to four hours to get their hair done, and return the next day to finish it off with another couple of hours, especially when they want very intricate patterns using very fine meshes to weave in or sew in, according to the client’s choice. In the meantime they'll just wrap a colorful piece of cloth around their head. With all this weaving and sewing that you see here, of women and girls’ hair, even on the pavements of Abidjan, it should not have been surprising that a friend of mine found her five year old daughter cutting off her lovely blond curls with a scissor. "What the hell are you doing, stop that immediately" she yelled at the little one, who responded calmly: "Mum, no need to get into such a fit! If you don't like it, I'll just sew it back on tomorrow!'

Et voila, so far on hair in Ivory Coast.

Big hugs,

Griet

Of a Ghana busride and Nigerian movies

A couple of months ago I was travelling by bus in Ghana. Not just a bus, but a shiny giant with the name DIPLOMAT written all over it. The ride was going to take me from Takoradi to Accra, Ghana’s bustling capital, in about five hours time, for the sum of 6 dollars.

So there I was, in a big bus filled with Africans of all sizes and ages, talking away in languages I’d never heard. It reminded me of being in a busy massage parlor in Vietnam, the women and clients chirping away and me not understanding a word, but somehow feeling very much at home amongst all those strangers.

A man entered the bus, carrying plastic waste baskets in various colors. I thought he was selling the latest Chinese merchandise, but later on I understood that the DIPLOMAT was to be kept very clean, and that all travelers’ little black plastic bags carrying their popcorn and fried bananas, were to end up in there.

While the bus was still waiting to fill up further, a man showed up waving a little book entitled ‘PLEASE REMIND THIS’. While waving the book, he explained some of what we could find inside. He said: “For instance, do not say ‘Hey woman’, but instead ‘Good day, spinster, mistress, or whatever her appropriate title is”. As for the tenses, he explained “The woman will come tomorrow, she will come today, and she came yesterday”. “Very easy”, he said. Also, “Do not say ‘You chop?’ But ‘Have you eaten?’ And women, do not ask money to just any man, only to your husband”. I was a bit puzzled if that was some moral lesson he added for free, or if there was some English grammar in there too, that needed to be improved… Anyway, after his presentation, various people raised their hands, wanting to buy a copy.

Then another man stood up and said “I am not going to talk much”, and went on to talk nonstop for three hours straight, or at least so it seemed, because long after the bus had left the station, he kept rattling on. At first his voice was rather pleasant, but then it started crackling as if it needed some oil, and instead of giving it some rest, the man then decided to start shouting. And shouting and shouting. I looked around wondering why all the passengers kept quiet. Wasn’t anyone going to ask him to shut up? Africans are somehow very tolerant and respectful. I don’t think in Europe we’d let anyone go on like that, unpunished.

Anyway, my neighbor was a young Ghanaian student. When I asked him what the man was talking about, the student told me that the man was preaching. And yes, at times the whole bus joined him to say ‘Amen’ and ‘Halleluiah’. I think he was praying for a safe journey. But once he got the crowds’ approval and attention, he quickly switched to professing us the incredible qualities of some kind of medicine he had on offer. He tried to convince us that the bottle he held in his hand, filled with a brownish concoction, could cure malaria, constipation and infertility in one go. He sold it for only two cedis a piece, which is about two dollars, so he was not going to get very rich selling it anytime soon. Which turned out to be true, because after telling us how great the medicine was, he then continued to tell all of us that he’d been selling this thing for many years already, and that by now he was 64 years old. He looked at least 90, but no one stood up to tell him that. But I think it might have put the travelers off from buying the medicine, because not many people offered to buy some, which clearly seemed to upset the old man. He tried once more to approach every single passenger, pushing the dangling medicine bottle in their face, but when most declined, his smile turned sour and he sat down.

I quietly rejoiced, thinking that now, finally, we were going to have some quiet. But lo and behold! the bus driver then proceeded to put on maximum volume a crackling copy of some Nigerian movie where a bunch of tall men and voluptuous women clad in colorful boubous were sitting in a large living room in gigantic velvet sofas, shouting at each other. Sometimes they moved to a terrace outside and then again into the living room inside the house. The shouting never stopped, women behaved rather hysterical, and some of them were always stealing money from their rich-but-not-so- good-looking- husbands, to pass it on to some younger-and-better-looking-lovers, who then passed it on to their long-legged-and-rather-pleasantly-built-girlfriends. But then somehow the married women always seemed to run into their lovers when they were out with their girlfriends and those exchanges were not always very edifying… Anyway, lots of shouting matches, lots of women fainting, lots of men consuming large amounts of whiskey, lots of men threatening to give their women a beating or two etc etc. Meanwhile the passengers on the bus did not seem bothered by the deafening noise nor the fact that the DVD got stuck all the time. They were enjoying all of it and laughing their eyes out.

As for me, I might have preferred a documentary on the lives of wolves or wash bears, but was forced to watch this Nigerian movie because of its all-invading sound, and also because there was little else to do since the curtains of the bus were drawn, so there was no chance to observe the scenery outside, which in a way was not such a bad thing as it made it easier to overlook the car wrecks littering the road side. (Some cars were barely recognizable and reduced to a fifth of their original size…)

Anyway, the sellers and the movies and the drawn curtains somehow worked wonders because before I knew it, the central character in the movie, a huge man with a tiny moustache, had dropped death (too much whiskey? Or a heart attack after the strain of giving his straying wife a ‘corrective beating’?) Anyway, the women around him in the movie (nieces, aunties, second and third wives etc) were all crying and yelling to God that they’d never betray their man anymore, whereas the audience in the bus was cheering and the DIPLOMAT came to a halt. We’d reached Accra!


END