Happy new year.
I've been really dumb about updating this blog. I had a bunch of little interesting things happen to me between now and the time I last updated my blog. I guess I just never felt like typing. I'm not going to promise that I'll update this blog more this year but I sure hope I do.
Right now, I'm sitting at a restaurant at an airport and waiting on a sandwich... burger? I don't really remember what I ordered. I was sat in front of a cute guy and I was feeling really awkward. So I hurriedly ordered whatever looked the best. I'm not even that hungry either. I just feel like eating. Great way to start of the year, right? I feel like I should have just not ate. I already ate so much during the holidays and I seriously lack any sense of self-control. It's sort of disturbing.
Right after Nigeria, I weighed myself for the first time in months and I actually lost about 6 pounds in total. I better have lost weight after eating 250-calorie lunches and granola bars for breakfast. I honestly thought I'd gain in Nigeria because whenever we ate, we ate greasy food from Nigerian restaurants. It was always fried plantains, oily stew with rice, and meat pies. But I guess that would be a once a day thing. We'd fill ourselves up with crackers for the rest of the day because we were afraid of catching diseases from eating any Nigerian food. It sucked being restricted from eating because at my mom's village, they grew all sorts of delicious fruits: mangoes, pineapples, coconuts, oranges... And my dad insisted I shouldn't eat any of it.
I guess I'll continue with my re-cap of Nigeria while I'm at it. I genuinely had a good time but I was sick for half of my time there. So apparently, me, humidity, and dust REALLY do not mix. My asthma had turned for the worst. I really thought I'd be okay with an inhaler and steroid medication because that's always kept me okay. So my mom and I arrived in Nigeria before my dad and my brother and we stayed in hotels until they got here. We have a big house in my dad's village which is where he stays whenever he takes his yearly trip to Nigeria. On my first day in our house in the village, I noticed that I had been getting out-of-breath really easily. I took my inhaler and my Advair and it wasn't working. It just got worse as the days went by until I finally just broke down in tears because I was really struggling to even walk to the next room. It was sort of terrifying. The nights were the worst. It got so bad that we decided that I'd just have to sleep in a hotel.
The house was really dusty. And it makes sense because it sits uninhabited for months on end except for my dad's nephews who live downstairs but they are obviously not cleaning a thing. You could hit the couch and see a cloud of dust escape from it. Other than the fact that I was dying, I felt like I was a white woman on vacation in a Spain villa. Almost the entire house is wrapped in balcony so you can look out over the homes in the village and wave at people walking by. If only I had been in better health, I would've explored the area more.
I mean, our main reason for being in Nigeria was to support our mother during our grandfather's burial. So we were basically running around trying to get things arranged for the service. It was so stressful for many reasons. But disregarding family problems, the roads are terrible, the police are corrupt (they stopped my dad twice to try and get money from him by saying that his vehicle registration wasn't accurate...). The best hotel in Aba had broken ceilings in the bathroom, the water ran brown, and the mugs smelled like soap and stew remnants.
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