Driving to Freetown reminded me that there was a whole sub-region to explore.  In September, I took three weeks off and traveled to Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, and Burkina Faso with Gunna.  I saw Timbuktu, rode on a cargo boat down the Niger, went hiking in Dogon Country, but this post isn’t about any of those things, this post is about the most miserable bus in the world.  It runs from Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire to Bamako, Mali.  Miserably.

This is the second part of a two part post, the final chapter in the Duology, in which the blogger, having concluded final preparations for a road trip to Freetown, sees the fruits of his labor.  Rest assured that this trip in no way took place in July.  The blogger values you, the reader, too much to keep you waiting for three months.  Though two months have passed since the last post, which, he swears was the full duration of his trip to Freetown, the blogger will recount events as though they happened over a four day weekend in July for artistic reasons known only to him.

“Where is your ECOWAS Brown Card?”  I was at the Liberian border and, sure enough, it turns out there is such a thing Brown Card.   I told the official about my previous attempts to secure a Brown Card in Monrovia and that ECOWAS itself was unaware of its existence.  I then refused, via some transitive property, to pay for documentation whose existence the issuing body largely refuted.  As I grew angry and made it clear that I was willing to use the full weight of my connections in Liberia to prevail, Vishal, sitting to my left, grew more apologetic.  The official responded to our Good Traveler, Bad Traveler routine and finally let us go with a warning that in the future we would be required to produce an ECOWAS Brown Card, or else.

This is a two-part post on a trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone.  The first post discovers the blogger in preparation of the journey, written as though the trip has not already happened, which is a lie…  The second post (which will be posted after enough time has passed so as to give the impression that the blogger went on the trip after the first post) recounts the journeying aspect of the journey.

Oh! Hello! Why, you’ve discovered me in preparation of a journey to Freetown…  I’m all packed up and ready to go and want to share useful travel tidbits with you on the eve of my departure, which is most definitely not in the past.  But first I want to make an observation: I’m not very good at the Africa Pissing Contest.  It is a game played by new arrivals and the aim is simple enough: wow those around you by listing the various places you have been in Africa with the aim being to establish your credibility on all things African, and, by extension, assert your worth as a human being.  The game differs from normal talk, where places in Africa and your having been to them might come up, and is either active or passive.

Dear Sir or Madam,

If you had the chance to make a difference, would you?

In Liberia, West Africa, many expatriates awake as early as 6am to the loud thumping of Akon songs outside their windows. Throughout the day, radio stations cycle through the same Akon songs. On the street, children sing the same Akon songs. In the evening, the bars and clubs play the same Akon songs. In order to survive, expatriates will claim that they like Akon; they will feel that they love Akon; they will lash out when outsiders tell them that Akon is not very talented; they will develop Pavlovian responses to Akon stimuli, most notably awkward dancing and singing-along when Akon is played. In short, in order to survive, expatriates succumb to Musical Stockholm Syndrome.

Four to five kids hawk pirated DVDs outside the grocery store. However, these aren’t your normal DVDs, these are behemoth 19-movies-on-one-DVD….DVDs. I’m not a scientist, so I’m not sure how they convinced 19 movies to squeeze onto one DVD. What I do know is that when I found out that it was possible to have 19 full-length, good quality movies on one DVD, I felt that my life until that point had been a sham. Newton’s classic conjecture, his oft cited Fifth Law of Playability (For every one DVD there is equally found one movie therein), stood mute in the face of a brave new science.

Well, I have officially been in Liberia for over a year. I have tried to describe small aspects of life here that you may find interesting, but it’s often hard to get across the true depth of the experience here. Some people have asked me how I come up with the posts for this blog, how long they take, do I plan them out, etc. Well, the answer is that before each post I compile a list of interesting, seemingly unrelated statistics and weave that story – the story of numbers – into a narrative. For avid readers, this explains the up-to-know mysterious primacy I grant numerology throughout the posts.

Liberia is hot, shaded with palm trees, and has breathtaking beaches. If ever there was a place meant to be ground zero for ice cream consumption, Liberia would be it. Liberians should be hapless, obese diabetics, waddling hourly to the corner ice cream stand, wheezing and gesturing at a picture to indicate how many scoops they want to tower on their next cone. Alas, this is not the case. A handful of restaurants catering to foreigners or the Liberian middle-class serve frozen soft serve or a gloppy substance resembling play dough. On the streets one company dominates the Liberian ice cream market, Quench Your Thirst International. Vendors roam the streets with wooden wheelbarrows selling ice cream that is cheap, but not very creamful. Foreigners have maybe one or two experiences with Quench Your Thirst International, then shrug and write off Liberian ice cream.

I decided to choose my own for a bit and headed to Europe, a journey with maps, for a month. I took hot showers, partook in no stadium riots, saw no Tercels, it was fantastic – the hot shower part at least. I traveled by rail with my backpack. At an art museum in Berlin I bought a poster to decorate my house back in Liberia, which, until now, has been decorated in what I call the Silent Post-Expressionist Style (Don’t look at what I’m hanging, look at what I’m NOT hanging. It’s a deep movement; also cheap). They put the poster in a laughably large prism-shaped box. And then I traveled by rail with my backpack and a giant Tolberone bar. I saw old friends, lots of euro-mullets, and even made some new friends. But, this post is not about any of that. Not at all. This post is about the Most Miserable Girl in the World.

After surviving the Akonalypse you tend to think that you have a certain prowess, a deft ability to navigate poorly managed mass events. 

 

Hey Sean, we’re buying tickets for the Liberia-Gambia game. Want us to pick you up one?

 

Sure. How much?

 

We’re going to buy the $20 VIP seats.

 

Oooooooo. Weeeeellll. You see, I was thinking about getting the cheap $3 dollar seats.

 

Really?  We’ve heard that those seats are pretty dangerous….

 

Yeah, well, you know….  The Akonalypse was pretty dangerous, but I have a certain prowess, a deft ability to navigate poorly managed mass events. You wouldn’t understand…

 

Ok. Well, we’ll pick one up for you just in case you change your mind.

 

My house has a ten foot wall around it. Topped with snarled coils of barbed wire. Four guards patrol the grounds with clubs. How tough would it be to sneak into chez Sean? One day, I drove up to my house in a big, white Carter Center SUV. I smiled at the guards. Hello! They smiled back and told me that Sean wasn’t there and that I couldn’t enter. They refused me entry to my own house on the basis that there was no one (i.e. ME) home to welcome me. They had beautiful logic. This is how tough it is to sneak into my house. I thought.