Cold Beverages!

19 March 2009

I have been too busy holidaying to blog recently, which means that I’m rather intimidated by the prospect of trying to sum up three weeks worth of life into an interesting posting. A simple, first we did this, then we did that can get really tedious, so I’ll try to just pull out a few scenes and stories.

After two night of very little sleep due to the singing and drumming at the church next door that ended at 10pm and started up again at 4am, M and I decided to try and find a cold drink to start off our evening (and help us sleep more soundly). We wandered around the village and discovered a cute little buvette called “Tanty Dorcas” that had a generator and therefore... wonder of wonders... cold beer.
Fending off a few marriage requests with increasingly forced smiles, we sat and chatted and shared beers until the little 10 year old ‘waitress’ told us they were closing (at 6.30 on a Saturday night!). Instead of going straight home, I convinced M to continue over to the other bar in the village. We walked along the dirt path, stumbling a little – more due to the encroaching darkness than anything else, I reassured myself. After one particularly nimble trip, I righted myself and found before me a field of warm yellow flickering lights. As we approached I remembered that Saturday is Tové’s night marché.
I’d never been brave enough to wander out to it on my own before, so I hadn’t seen the gorgeously-lit scene of marché mamas, children and the inevitably ‘charming’ moto drivers. Each table had a little can, filled with kerosene and a nearly 2-inch open flame flickering out of it. M and I walked slowly up and down the aisles of wooden tables, being gently cajoled by the sellers to buy onions or dried fish, plastic buckets or “dead yovo” secondhand clothes. We settled on some fried plantains and left the magical little scene to find the bar where we were entertained by tiny children and exchanged cultural greetings (we taught them how to ‘high-five’ and they taught us a fist to fist, fist to heart salute).
Satiated with cold beverages and our adventure, we headed back home to sit on the porch for a while, chatting and playing music loudly in a passive-aggressive and futile revenge against the all-night vigils, ridiculously loud radios and absurdly vocal cockerels that had plagued our nights all week. And then we slept very soundly.

Picture
M nearly falling into the cistern trying to submerge the bucket in the severely reduced water level 1002375
Me and my homologue Da E at her atelier 100 2366