BAaaaHH....baaAAhhhHHh.....

TGIF!!!  The upside of working in Nigeria is that Friday's are half work days... I just woke up from a glorious, much-needed nap.  Jess and I got off work around 1230 and headed over to the fancypants new mall that houses one of two movie theaters (cinemas, they call it here) in Abuja, in an attempt to find her a pair of dress shoes for the Marine Corps Ball tomorrow.  However, to no avail, we did not find anything suitable--everything was ridiculously overpriced, not to mention fugly, oh and boat-sized.  I guess they don't carry anything less than a size 40 here.  We wandered into one of the restaurants in the shopping complex after we exhausted all the stores there (and there really weren't that many)... stood in front of the cash register for about 10 minutes it seemed like, trying to figure out what we wanted for lunch.  I think my ability to make executive decisions has been affected, maybe there's something in the water here... I mean, how difficult is it to choose between pizza, burgers, chicken nuggets or rotisserie chicken?  Apparently incredibly difficult.  As we stood there stupidly staring at the menu board and talking through our decisions out loud, we caught the attention of two guys sitting behind us eating lunch.  One of them tried to get our attention--now normally, in the States, I would just turn around and politely acknowledge them if they said "excuse me", but in Nigeria, I've learned that usually, the Nigerians just want to scream CHINACHINACHINA at you or try and get you to buy something.  However, he didn't quite have as strong of a Nigerian accent, so I turned around and he asked us if we were from the States... I said I was from California and he remarked that he thought I had a Southern California accent--first of all, I didn't know SoCal had an accent, nor did I ever think I had an accent.  Turns out it is a ridiculously small world, even at a random mall in Nigeria, as this kid said he was from the San Fernando Valley when I asked him where he was from.  (Note: only people who know LA really well and actually grew up in the valley know that it's called the SFV)  How crazy is that?!  He even mentioned that he went to Sepulveda middle school and Reseda high school... I mean, you can't make this up on the fly if you tried.  I remarked that I used to have a bus stop at Reseda when I took the bus in middle school, and he was like, "Wait, you went to Portola for middle school?"  !!! O_O  I was seriously floored.  Anyhow, as a semi-lame ending to the story, he suggested to order the burgers for lunch, so we exchanged numbers and ordered a burger each (well, I got a cheeseburger, heh)... while we waited for our food, power went out a few times, cashiers stared at us, some random person tried to take our picture... yeah, we attract quite a lot of attention.  This is what I thought of when we finally got our food:

Cheeseburger was decently good, fries had a weird potato-y taste to it (unlike McDonald's fries, which taste like BEEF), and coke didn't taste like… coke.  Wasn't sickly sweet, probably because it doesn't contain loads of HFCS, hah.  However, had too much mayo… waaaay too much mayo.  What is the Nigerian obsession with that stuff?  Meh.

Anyhow, last culturally awkward thing to note:
Yesterday Jess and I were stuck at work quite late, trying to help the senior technical team edit a massive grants document... in short, it was a very long two hours of he said... he said (because everyone on the senior tech team is male), and after drawing stick figures, diagrams, phrasing and rephrasing objectives and measurable outcomes, we were able to come up with a semi-functional document.  The most difficult part was contending with the sheep/goat that was bleating incessantly outside the office.  At first I thought I was going crazy from staring at the Word document (I had started hearing things the night before, most likely a mefloquine-induced dream), but no, the team lead confirmed that there actually was a sheep/goat outside.  This weekend is Eid, a Muslim holiday, and some people will just give things out... apparently goats and sheep are items that you can gift away... people take them home and sacrifice them for the Muslim holiday.  I wanted to sacrifice it then and there because it wouldn't shut up, but that probably would not have reflected the cultural sensitivity that I should/do have... :T

Hopefully will not need to count any sheep before I go to bed tonight...