Tuesday, December 27, 2005 I'm alive. Sorry for the lack of updates, but as with you all: holidays are crazy.

All starting last Thursday where Ly and I went down to Azové to visit the ol' host family. It was good to see them all again, and certainly odd to be able to understand what they were saying. Most of stage was dictated by me having no idea what was going on. Okay, so my entire Peace Corps experience has been that... still the language has certainly ceased to be a large contributing factor.

Friday morning we picked a few up and headed out to Grand Popo. It's funny, I never realized how much I liked the beach until I didn't have the ability to go any time I wanted. Most of my life I've been within miles of the ocean, and now here I'm no less than 7 hours from it. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be Kansas or something.

Grand Popo was all in all awesome. Good food, good times, but not enough time. Saturday morning began the hope of a quick trek back to Parakou. Thankfully we were travelling as 5, so it wasn't a problem to get an entire taxi. Only a little bit of discussion, and we had a cab to ourselves. Problem is that Victory Way changed their celebrations around a bit, so we got into Parakou just as the celebration was ending. Big time bummer. Even so though, all the gifts that arrived in time (up to the last minute possible) were packed off and distributed. Everyone got a gift, and no one was left out. Katherine, our GAD coordinator will be writing a description of the event and a gallery will be coming up later this week. Hope you all rememeber what wrapping paper you used!

Sunday was a day of rest and relaxation. Except I broke a guitar string. That sucked, because so far as I know the nearest replacement set is 7 hours to the south in Cotonou. Suckage. I did get a hint from the guard today that there might be a place in town. We'll see. I did see a guy the other day playing guitar, if I find him again I'll ask him.

In any case, there was the standard tchuke marché run, only this time with the gift of sodabi. I brought a litre and a half of it down south to give away up here. Adja sodabi is regarded as the best in country, so a gift of it is highly regarded. On the way to the marché where it was to be given my zemi ran out of gas, I offered to fill his tank with one of the bottles... but he declined for reasons of safety. You see fueled by sodabi one of the small mopeds on which we are all accostomed to riding would quickly become a crotch rocket.

After all that, pizza and cheese and wine soirée. Delicious.

Monday we went swimming and had a rehash of the most delicious dish yet discovered in country. Pork, Pirron and BLOOD SAUCE. Oh man, it's so good. Pork is barbecued and super good, pirron is pate with ghari mixed in (and ghari is dried mantioc aka. yucca) and blood sauce. Well, I didn't know it was blood sauce until the second time I ate it. It's thick, brown and gravy like. Really tasty. The entire affair for a huge amount of meat, sauce and pate will set you back about $0.80.

Now I'm back to work, and not wanting to be. Good thing New Years is around the corner, Tabaski just after that! More on the great goat feast of Tabaski as I learn more.

Friday, December 16, 2005 Hoho! Didn't expect this turn of events did you? Well, not everything is working right (I did stupid things like not link correctly in the navigation...) but it's up anyway. I've changed a couple sections of the website, most notably the learn section to include....

The Hobo Wine Tutorial

Yeah, rockin!

Who knows what crazy productive thing I'll do next?

Actually I do... it's clean up the terrible organization of the directory structure in my website. That's another story though.

Thursday, December 15, 2005 Well, well. Long tme no post. Sorry, been particularly busy. In any case, I did hammer out enough time to put the finishing touches on an article that will launch a new section of my site. The 'learn' section of the site has always been particularly useless, so i'm going to be changing it dramatically. 'learn' will henceforth be the repository for lots of fun exciting things, from my hobo wine adventure to a myriad of reviews. No, hobo wine isn't quite ready... but instead feast your eyes on:

The Great Fan Milk Review

I intend on reviewing lots of things here in Benin, from laundry soap, to flavored condoms, to goats. It's going to be awesome. Just you wait.

Hobo wine hopefully will be up later this week... we'll see how things go at work this week.

Saturday, December 10, 2005 My laptop is alive! Now if only it weren't 2,000 miles away across oceans and cultures. Thanks to the studliest volunteer alive, Brendan my long months of laptopness are now in sight. Now I just have to wonder how long it will be until the next problem. This one was really close to the wire, AppleCare expires in like 3 weeks. Hmmm.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005 Happy Hump Day!

Still not too much going on, more and more of the same. Reading lots of books (I think I'm at a pretty steady pace of 2 novels per week), working daily at my new office, riding my bike, getting called battoure (or yovo); and that's really pretty much it.

No wonderful revelations this time or shocking insights. I still haven't got the hobo-wine feature up yet. Sorry =/

Oh, one sad piece of news... my USB SD Card Reader has gone up to technology heaven. Or it may still be languishing here, but in any case it's fried enough that I can't read cards... this may present innumerable delays in getting pictures up. Not sure yet if the workstation computer will take kindly to my camera. I'll make every effort to try in the near future.

Saturday, December 03, 2005 Whew, it's Friday. Not really a lot has gone on this week since I wrote last.

I did get paid, as you've all no doubt surmised. Life is good. We celebrated by heading out to a restaurant I had been wanting to try for some time called "La New Cigale". Oh my gosh, it was freakin' awesome. Seriously. All I can say is "Salade Mexicaine" and "Pizza Orientale". Wow. The salad had rice and beans, and was just totally delicious in every possible. Ly was the orderer of the Pizza Orientale ("Je veux le pizza orientale, comme moi"), whereas I opted for a cheaper option. I was so wrong. Hers, while not very oriental at all (even after the waitress promised to tell the cook to make it extra oriental since an asian person was ordering it) it was delicious. It had bell peppers, odd little things that tasted like pepperoni and oh, just it rocked. The entire restaurant is the coolest place I've been so far in Parakou actually. It's decorated nicely, they have fans over each table... and they even have a full sized billiards table (now you have no excuse NOT to visit, Sam!). That being said, it's probably also the most expensive place I've been in Parakou as well. Our total meal cost for the three of us (with beers) was 18.000 CFA (or about $36). Yeah, in American terms that's nothing... but for a PCV that's 6 days salary. If you were working a modest job at $7/hour that would mean this meal would have cost us $336!!! ($7/hr * 8 hr/day * 6 days)Holy crap! Actually my calculations are a little off, since your modest $7/hour job would have to be pure profit and not take into account things like rent... even so though, damn.

Other than that nothing really to report. I did finally buy some dishes and silverware, go me. I got black rimmed plates and purple handled silverware. You're all now officially welcome to dinner at my place whenever you're ready.

One thing I didn't mention is that my laptop is now being transported to the states by a friend here. Hopefully I can get in touch with him soon though, because I don't think he really knows what to do with it. The laptop saga continues!