Yellow Table, for Yellow Woman?

After almost 3 weeks, I finally feel like I am settling into my life here in Nigeria.  I think Jess and I have finished outfitting our apartment--we do need a bit more fabric to hang up curtains, definitely need them in the bathroom, since people can totally see all the happenings that go on in there-- but overall, it's pretty much a furnished apartment now.  I think we finally lost that echo in the living room; our friend dropped off his parents' extra living room furniture, just need to get a coffee table from another expat friend now, and the living room is complete!  Dining room furniture has finally been moved to the nook/dining area, and we actually sat down during lunch to enjoy the view of... the concrete pillars, haha.
Made a new friend at the Taiwan Trade Mission and he graciously took us this morning to Wuse Market, the largest outdoor local market in Abuja.  Crazy times, yet again.  The vendors are way more aggressive than the ones at Utako market--a few even grabbed my arm to steer me towards their stalls.  Sigh.  It can get to be a bit stressful having people follow you around, especially the boys that follow you around with their wheelbarrows, hoping that you will "dash" them for wheeling around your groceries or whatever else you buy at the market.  However, it does make shopping all the more exciting--walked by the meat and produce section in the back of market complex, and saw one person holding raw chunks of beef ribs maybe, one in each hand, and another person wheeling a wheelbarrow full of various chopped up cow? parts.. looked too big to be goat.  I sort of wrinkled my nose when he walked by (meat sitting out in a hot environment obviously smells funny) and he laughed at me.  Over the course of 2 hours, I bought a snazzy new laundry drying rack, two basins to do laundry in, a dish drying rack, a frying pan, a small round YELLOW plastic table and plastic lawn chair to act as my mini workstation at home (I subsequently semi-broke one of the table legs as I was trying to assemble it at home... sigh.  So cheap, yet so inordinately priced... I think I paid almost $30 for the table and chair!).
Originally Jess and I had planned to string up rope somehow around the flat and just use that method to dry clothes, but after the mishap of nailing fabric to the walls for makeshift curtains and finding out that the nails would just bounce right out, I decided to shell out the money for an actual drying rack...oh, and not to mention the stories we heard about worms and flies and other creepy crawlies laying their eggs in your clothes if you dry it outside, and how the larvae/pupae would grow in your skin would just come crawling out of your pores.. ugh.  Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.  In the course of haggling for the kitchen stuff I bought yesterday, definitely got asked if I was married... that was fun, hehe.  Played the coy card and got the vendor to throw in a sink strainer too.
Late in the afternoon, Jess and I took a trip down to the local gym to check out the facilities and see if it was worth spending $70 a month to enroll in... and like everything else in Abuja, the answer is a resounding NO.  Cramped, crowded, funky smells (ok, really have to get used to the smells here in Africa), overall not worth the money.  Going to check out the Hilton facilities and see what they have to offer.  Then we mosied on over to the National Hospital to shadow a doctor we had met at a house party a week ago... didn't actually see much, since it was a slow day, but got a chance to tour the hospital grounds and get a sense of how their health system works.
Came home dead tired, ate a package of instant noodles, half a mango, and passed out around 11... what a sad Saturday existence, haha.  No matter, today we will hit the arts and crafts market and see what they have to offer.

Monday we are meeting the US Ambassador of Nigeria... not sure what the purpose is for, but gonna have to bust out the new iron we bought last week to make sure we look presentable. :)