Happy Birthday Baby J!!

Happy holidays everyone; I hope the greeting cards in matching cheesy sweaters and drunken make outs under the mistletoe at the office Christmas party are putting everyone into the spirit of the season. I’ve been listening to Charlie Brown Christmas music all morning, but it isn’t making it anymore real when I glance outside and see palm trees and kids running around all naked due to the heat.
Things are going great here; I’m making slow but steady progress pimping out my house and meeting neighbors. I have a few friends at the bar down the street that sell grilled fish and drink all night every night, so I’ve been hanging out and drinking 40s with them when I’m not exploring other watering holes around the village. My first night, one of them informed me that the bar was out of, well, booze in general (a problem much more common than you’d think), so she took me to this 60 year old woman’s house in the middle of nowhere, where the broad had constructed a bar in the middle of her yard that served warm beer and whiskey. As it turns out, this place is pretty popular among the elites, as I met the chief of police and the owner of the huge Sodocotton compound there. Score, I guess…
I suppose I should point out that I’m not telling stories about drinking and bars here because I think that’s all you guys want to here or because I’m trying to be like yeah, college in Africa; it’s more because it’s such a huge part of life here. Like, yeah we have people in the states that drink away their children’s college funds, but some of the parents here actually watch their kids grow distended stomachs and die from common colds just so they can black out in a field with their buddies every week day. It gives a good many of my bad decision Thursdays a whole new perspective…and one I currently choose to ignore.
Christmas was absolutely bizarre. I met up with the other whiteys in our provincial capitol for Christmas Eve and we went to drink and hang out at the hotel bar where we were staying, and it turns out the hotel was hosting a high school dance at the same time and place. Long story short, a lot of my friends ended up grinding on Cameroonians ranging in age from 14 to like 23 while I belted out Let it Snow and pretended I was drinking really strong egg nog and not boxed wine the costed 2 american dollars. For Christmas morning, we ate omelets and fried plantains and listened to Bing Crosby, then we randomly watched Beauty and the Beast, with an extended break to discuss Tim Curry’s role as the Evil Pipe Organ in the sequel and why this organ is never alluded to in the original, though he apparently posed a pretty formidable threat to their love during Belle’s Christmas season in captivity…You know, my typical ponderings during lazy/hungover weekends when I can’t find Flight of the Navigator or a random E True Hollywood Story to keep my mind limber.