Happy New Year

Our new year was pretty surreal this year. We planned to go for a few drinks in Figaro's and meet up with some of the football guys. Well as this is Africa things never go to plan. We set off in the afternoon to watch some traditional wrestling with Didimus and Sylvester, however once we got there they had decided to not wrestle today as they did not want to be injured for the new year. We left and headed back home. We passed a memorial service of a friend of Didimus' we thought we were dropping him of and carrying on home but he insisted we come with him. It was a memorial party for a man that died a year ago. We had great fun everyone was very welcoming and happy that we came. We had some great food, and some drinks. We kept getting accosted by a crazy old drunk lady who kept posing for various photographs and would not leave me along once she discovered I was a nurse. Didimus saved me and we moved outside. His dancing groups were also present so they were playing the xylophone and we were trying to do some traditional dancing, it involves shrugging your shoulders a lot.

We then went down to Figaro for midnight although no one appeared to make a big deal of it. Christmas is the time for parties and new year is the time for church!

New years day was very busy, the morning was spent sleeping due to churches keeping me awake all night. We then had 3 invitations for lunch and one evening invitation. We managed to get out of one of the lunch invitations and went to two. One was a chap from Joe's football club who lives down the road from us, we popped in there for a bit of lunch and had to leave soon after. Then we went to some friends of Genesis and Marceline who are on the board of directors for HINT. Here we had another lunch - feeling pretty full now! Afterwards we went back to the first house (as we had to leave early), we were offered more food but managed to politely refuse and just have a small glass of wine while discussing the death of Saddam Hussein

In the evening we had been invited to the promotion party of a guy in the football club. He had gone from Captain to Commander in the army. I thought it would be a few relaxed drinks in his house, oh no it was a proper posh party with the Governor of the South West present. There were chairs set up outside and sofa's taken outside for the Governor to sit on. The entrance of the Governor and others was announced and we were all upstanding. The program then commenced (in french as most military personnel are francophones). It mostly involved various people giving speeches and pouring champagne over the Commander. Then we ate again!!

So our new year mostly involved eating, not too different to home then.

I wish you all a happy new year, hope you have a fantastic 2007.