Lome, Togo and Thanksgiving in Africa

About the long delay since the last post: I got sick again. Probably another "petit salmonelle", but this one took awhile to get over. Hooray for anti-biotics! ...and yes Lynn, I have been using the hand sanitizer you gave me...this time I got wiped out by some undercooked sauce. Vive l'Afrique.

After a grueling 18+ hour bus ride, smashed in shoulder to shoulder, knees touching the back of the seat in front and NO TOILETS (Not even at the 'rest stops' - and when I say 'toilets' I mean hole in the ground surrounded by 1-4 walls - and when I say 'no' I mean go hide behind a tree...if you can find one)...no sinks either...and since I'm on the subject, NO FOOD! At the 'rest stops', women were selling bags of onions. ONIONS! What am I supposed to do with ONIONS on a hot, stinky bus? It's 8am! Someone find me a cup of Nescafe and a boiled egg! (As you can see, I'm still a little bent out of shape by the whole experience). At the border between Burkina Faso and Togo, young boys were selling old, 1980s telephones. Again, what exactly am I supposed to do with an old telephone while traveling through Africa? Find me a Nescafe and a boiled egg for crying out loud!!! No luck. Sometime around midnight, after the driver "bought a cup of coffee" (read: 'bribed') for the policeman who stopped us for no apparent reason, we passed though Lome. Still jumpin' on a Sunday night. We turned right and drove along the ocean. Hot and humid, palm trees everywhere. Yeah, the ocean.

A friend in Bobo-Dioulasso had given us the name of a friend of his here, Vincent, who has become a good friend of ours. We celebrated Thanksgiving with him, his wife and 2 kids, the owner of the hotel where we are staying and a few other guests of the hotel. I made pheasant, stuffing, mashed potatoes and butternut squash pie (I couldn't find pumpkin and, as it turns out, butternut squash tastes just as good). Sounds pretty traditional, right? It was, except for two things. For one, we ate dinner on the terrace in shorts and T-shirts (sipping rum punch). The other was the way the pheasant met its end. When buying birds in the market, you buy them live. We picked out two good looking birds and the saleslady shoved them in a plastic sack and handed them to us. OK then. (Sitting on the back of a motorcycle taxi with two sacks of live pheasant under your arms is an experience not to be missed if you ever have the opportunity.) The guardian at the hotel offered to kill the birds for us (thank goodness), but Mamy, the hotel owner, insisted that we get them drunk with rum which would not only kill them in a more pleasant way (for them), but the meat would be tastier. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it is to never argue with a 78 year-old Vietnamese woman...so out came the rum. The pheasants took their time, but eventually drifted off to fermented-sugar-cane-heaven. The guardian sliced and plucked, I stuffed, and after a couple of hours and the quick placement of lime slices to keep the birds from drying out (a practice I will use again in the future because 1. it works and 2. tastes great!) we had an awesome feast.