This Post Is Terrible and Unedited. Deal with it.

The interweb has left my life for the moment, so this blag post, while written, probably won’t get up on the internet for a while. It is the second full day in Cameroon.

We arrived on Friday at about 4:30pm, approximately two hours before Paul Biya (the Prez) was due back from Nigeria’s 50^th anniversary of independence. As we were driving back to town from the airport there were soldiers (and snipers!) everywhere, ready to shut down traffic when he arrived.

Besides the politics and drama, the flight in was really nice. I’ve always been happy to fly Belgiun’s airline—the food is always good. Eva and I flew in and we watched the land below us change between Tunisia’s desert to greener and greener. Yaounde is beautiful, green with red soil that you can see from the sky.

We got into the hotel, Hotel Azur which is located in Bastos (the posh/expat bit of town). We’re just down the street from the pink Brazilian embassy and the German embassy.

Met up with Joe (a research Fulbrighter) and ate dinner in the hotel before passing out,

Woke up on Saturday, early, and started exploring the town. We wandered around Bastos, past Restos and people selling cards, into a supermarché called au bon prix and down around the road. We found an awesome resto/food stand (like the egg shack near WARC except that it had lace hanging over the doorway) and ordered eggs with spaghetti and Eva got an omelet. Then we went down the hill and saw this beautiful garden, people selling craw-fish and a football field with people playing soccer(really well, actually). 

We then took a random road off of the rond-point and headed up towards what appeared to be a neighborhood. 

Then we wandered up to this neighborhood with fancy houses and lots of embassies. Some people outside the house said they liked my dress (Sarah! It was the purple one I got in St. Louis!).We climbed up the hill and randomly ran into our hotel. The goal of the day was actually to walk to the American embassy, so we went there next and ran into our expeditor who told me about how one can get cell phones with two sim cards (les puces) how crazy is that?

Then we decided to walk up Mt. Febe to get a good view of the city: Eva decided to take a short cut up the golf court.  It was the most intense short cut ever, the golf course’s main hill is at a 90 degree angle. But once we got to the top we had been told that there is a gate to the hotel and we just had to push. So we did and got up into Hotel Mt. Febe, super posh, great view. Had drinks in the hotel and they tried to give me money (the bartender took my 5 thou cfa and gave me the chance as though I'd paid with 10 thou). Also tried to get a better map of Yaounde (later that evening when I was asking if there was a good map of Yaounde I was told that if I found one I was expected to share the wealth), though the map we were given was from 2001. Eva's guidebook is from 2008 yet still is horribly out of date.

Mignon invited us to an Oktoberfest bash, with beer and brat and sauerkraut, which was just a bizarre experience to have for the first thirty minutes. Afterward it became uber (I know, so German) fun and all of us made a ton of connections with other Americans and expats in Yaounde. I even met some people who had been to Bertoua! 

Another connection formed was a former peace corps volunteer, current awesome person and teacher named Kelly gave me a potential ‘shopping list’ for living out in the boonies. This includes a big pot to boil water, water filter, mozzie net (1000cfa),  Tupperware (for weevils), bush-lamp, candles, camping stove (with attachment for gas), flat sheets. Most of this could be bought at Nikki, the supermarché in town with lots of branches. She also told us about markets, the big one Mokolo is where one ought not take a purse and can be slightly overwhelming the first time (I’m thinking like Sandaga in Dakar), though it does have the most stuff. The other market she mentioned was Etoudi, which was about 200cfa from our hotel. We also made dinner plans for Tuesday.

Later that night Mignon told Eva and I when we’d be taking off for our posts. I’m leaving on Thursday at 8am, the day after our orientation ends, and Eva’s taking off for Bambili next Tuesday. Exciting though I’m a bit bummed that I won’t get to explore Yaounde a bit longer.

Sunday

The three of us dragged ourselves out of bed for church, because Mackenzie (one of the research Fulbrighters) had spent the night. Yesterday as Eva and I were hauling ourselves all over town we had seen people crawling and praying up the steps to the Benedictine monastery on Mt. Febe. Eva wanted to go to service and I was definitely interested in going to see that. We went to Au Bon Prix, I grabbed some madeleines and the others ate beignets. Then we cabbed up the mountain for 800 cfa (500 cfa is approximately a buck btw), which seemed like too good of a deal based on how quickly the cabbie accepted our offer. Silly ‘les blanches’. The service was great, it seemed like a  really tight-knit community in that church. They made fun of one of their priests who had been gone for three months and grown a beard. One of the priests was an Indian guy who incorporated the teaching of sages into his sermon, interesting right? Reminded me a bit of Vas. After the service we ran into one of the people we met at Oktoberfest at church (WHO we’d also seen at the golf course while walking up the hill and who I’m fully expecting to see today).

We went back to the hotel watched Rachel Maddow and fell asleep for awhile, because we’d worn ourselves out the day before. Then Eva and I dragged ourselves out of bed, has some leftover Belgian chocolate for lunch and headed off in the direction of Etoudi market. THIS was where we’d figured out how much a 200 cfa per place taxi far was worth in distance. I’ll have you know it’s pretty far, I’d say easily a 10-20 minute ride (including some slow downs to see if there were people interested in going). Etoudi was pretty chilled as far as markets go, we saw the food section, perused spices, saw cooking supplies, and saw some dresses (we each got one just to see if our bargaining skills were where they ought to be). Then we wandered down the hill and up again, past Paul Biya’s big mutated Grecian monstrosity of a house (though I’ll admit it’s not quite as boxy and prison-like as our embassy--don't get me wrong though, I love embassies because of the people I meet inside them. Aesthetically they do nothing for me.). 

Then we started seeing houses of a not-so-nice quality, the sun was becoming lower and the sky and we didn’t really want to start wandering into areas of town we weren’t familiar with (esp. since it’s only our second full day in Yaounde). But I started to get convinced we were in the right area, and then we saw OBAMA’S FAN CLUB (which was the landmark for getting back) and we took a cab for 300cfa in total to get back to the hotel.

Jade was supposed to get in and she was rather late, but Eva and I held off waiting for her til about 8 o’clock. At that point we were starving and Eva suggested to go to a Chinese place (there’s a large Chinese population in Yaounde—when we were in the market she kept being called la chinoise, people said “ni hao” which kind of sounded like “nee haw” or "hello" in Mandarin. Eva’s family speaks Cantonese (totes jealous, Vas why didn't you teach us Kannada?). At the resto, which Eva started calling “her place” we realized we hadn’t yet eaten Cameroonian food (other than street food), I’m especially thinking of trying Ndole which is the national dish. (it’s a green bitter leaf dish with groundnuts/peanuts).

Jade finally came, really late last night after a ridiculous travel day and though we were really excited to see her we decided to let her sleep since we have a big day today. It’s 7:20 am, we’re not being picked up for our orientation til 8:30 am and there’s still no interweb. "Oh interweb, where are you?" cried the spoiled little western princess.