Last night a note was pushed under the door saying fumigation of apartment will be done from 8 till 12 on Monday 10 July.  Not long after another one was pushed under the door saying fumigation will be done from 8 till 12 on Tuesday 10 July.  I couldn't possibly stay in the apartment while it was being fumigated so I decided to pluck up my courage and spend the day out and about.  Our driver dropped John at work and then took me to The Hilton.  I took my time to browse all the floors and made note of all the shops there and what the restaurants had to offer.  Wednesday night is steak night at Fulani Pool Restaurant and we're sure to check out that one.  After about half an hour of browsing inside and outside, I went to The Pastry Shop and had a cappuccino and a very large slice of Black Forest cake, yummy.  The driver fetched me at The Hilton at 12h00 and dropped me at the Silverbird Mall.  I need to find sundried tomatoes and I was hoping to get some there but unfortunately it is a newish mall and still very unoccupied with no supermarket as yet.  Not sure if one is planned for that mall. It has four levels and I had a lot of time to kill so I walked around on each floor.  There wasn't much to see but it had movie theatres on the fourth level and I bought a ticket for a movie called "Brave" at 14h30.  It's an animated movie about a royal family in Scotland that nearly gets destroyed because of the daughter's selfishness.  As it was only 12h45, I decided to have some lunch first.  I'd joined Internations and my first question had been where to find good coffee and a number of people came back recommending Bunna Cafe, so I decided to have lunch there.  The coffee at The Hilton had been good but the coffee at Bunna Cafe, definitely better.  I had a smoked chicken sandwich with lettuce and tomato, another cappuccino and a tropical fruit smoothie.  I chose a seat at the window so I could sit and watch what was going on outside.  Just across the road I saw a number of mudhuts and asked my waiter what they were and he said that it was an arts and culture village.  I absolutely love the dresses the women wear here and I want one.  My next visit will be to the village, hopefully with my new friend Doreen who I'm meeting on Friday for the first time and hopefully I'll get my dress there too.  I also want to visit the public library and spend some time there.  I am itching to take photos but I'm so scared.  I asked our driver this morning if I could take a picture of the biggest mosque I've ever seen.  We were told that the massive dome is made of solid gold.  It is awesome ,but he said that I couldn't take the picture for security reasons.  John's colleague spent some two hours in police custody for taking photos, so I'll pass on that.  I think I did well on my first day out and about in Abuja.  It felt good.

Still no car in sight.  Guy from Avis came and gave us a quote.  Now we wait for approval from the powers that be.  I think I'm going slowly nuts sitting in this apartment all day when there are places to go and people to meet but after hearing the horror stories of abductions, I suppose I'll opt for insanity.

Visited the brand new Shoprite yesterday and shopped till we dropped.  I never thought I'd shop at a Shoprite again but that's why never say never right? They had most of the things I needed but I couldn't find sundried tomatoes anywhere.  I asked for some lamb and they chopped up that lamb just any which way.  I'm not sure it is indeed lamb, it might be goat.  Anyway we're having Lamb Rogan Josh for supper. I wonder what I'll get if I should ask for lamb chops. 

After carrying it all up two flights of stairs and unpacking, it was nearly time for mass.  This time we went to Holy Trinity, which is a stone throw away from our apartments.  The trip still cost us NGN4000, there and back.  At least our driver also got a chance to go to mass.  We'd just had communion when there was a power failure, which is a common thing here, and had to wait about 5 or 10 minutes for the generators to kick in.

They hadn't done an inventory of our apartment yet and I mentioned that most of the crockery was chipped.  I got a brand new set right away. That's the only good thing I can think of for today.  It doesn't help that hubby heard that they might want to keep him here longer. 

So now the time has come for us to get our own car from either Avis or Hertz.  Hubby started phoning these companies last night with no joy.  He called Hertz and left a voice message, so far nobody has replied.  He then called Avis and a guy answered and said that he was driving and would call back.  He never did.  This morning hubby calls him again and he says he's not available right now but would give him his colleague's contact details.  He sms's the details through and hubby phones the number and all he hears is The Our Father being said.  We don't know if this is a voicemail or what.  I feel another challenge coming up. It costs us NGN2000 per hour everytime we use a taxi to go anywhere. So as hubby gets ready to leave for work this morning I wish him a great day and tell him that I hope that one of the car companies will get back to him.  He responds by saying, "ja, else I'll have to call them again and maybe I get a Hail Mary this time."  Thank God we still have our sense of humor.

This morning on our way to breakfast we met up with this guy doing pushups. They move their bodies up and down in order to gauge the level of danger.  If you come too close, they stop doing pushups and scurry into the nearest bush. 

Haven't had much excitement today.  I've been a real Lotus eater , just lazing about but realizing I can't do this every day for the next two months, I've decided to join a Meetup group again. 

Just heard a loud boom.  There's a lot of speculation on Internations about whether is was a bomb blast or thunder.  Didn't sound like thunder to us.  Seems to be a blast opposite Park N Shop, one of the biggest supermarkets in Abuja. 

When we first negotiated moving into the apartment, we had to pay everything up front but we couldn't as they didn't accept credit cards only cheques which we didn't have as we didn't have Nigerian bank accounts.  I did a telegraphic transfer from our bank in Singapore to the bank in Nigeria and it was rejected because Standard Chartered does not have an agent to convert Sing Dollar to Niara.  We found this out this morning at 2am Nigerian time, 9am Singapore time when we phoned our bank in Singapore to ask why the transfer had rejected.  On the day I did the transfer, I emailed Standard Chartered and the customer care centre sent me a reply to confirm that I could transfer Sing Dollar to their bank.  So now we're stuck.  We might be out on the street by tonight.  It's gonna be a looooong Monday.  Why must everything be so difficult?

To top it all I found the mother of all cockroaches on the floor just inside the main door.  Good thing he was already on his back but his legs were still moving so I gave him another shot of the old Mortein odourless and kicked him out the door.  He's still lying where I kicked him so very rudimentary cleaning gets done on the weekend.

I now have to use bottled water for everything.  Yesterday I cooked some Irish Stew and rice.  For the first time ever, I cooked rice in the microwave.  If I had cooked it in a pot, like I usually do, I would need bottled water to cook it in and then bottled water to rinse it with.  Then I had another challenge.  My microwave sits on top of the fridge and I have to reach up over my head to get things in or out.  I decided to climb onto a chair but I need both hands to climb off a chair so how to take the rice out of the microwave without getting burnt or breaking something?  Ask hubby to do it. Always knew I needed one for something, now I know why. Note to self - get a little table for microwave. I can just imagine getting something boiling hot out there and tipping it over my face, not a happy thought.

During the week I googled catholic churches close to us and found The Holy Rosary Catholic Church.  I made note of the address and times of mass.  We decided we'd do the evening mass.  In the meantime hubby had heard from a taxi driver that the one closest to us was the Holy Trinity so earlier this evening we leave for mass both thinking we're heading for The Holy Rosary where mass was at 17h30 when we were instead on our way to Holy Trinity where mass was at 6.  So it's 17h30 and hubby says "there's nobody here and it's 17h30 already.  Then we realize we're at the wrong parish, hop into the taxi again and arrive at the church half way through the gospel reading, eish. It felt kind of weird as we got a lot of stares.  Only later I realized all the women had a covering of some sorts on their heads and I had none.  Maybe that was the reason for the stares.  It was also really difficult to understand the priest.  Suppose I'll get used to the accent eventually.  Security was very strict.  My bag was searched and hubby had to take everything he had out of his pockets which made us even more late.

I am thankful that we could join this community and celebrate mass. 

The new apartment was great except the bathroom door creaked really badly and so I asked if they could do something about that which they promptly did but at the same time they noticed something wrong with the main door and decided to fix that as well. We had this long list of shopping items to get, so we called the driver to fetch us and take us to the new Shoprite but we did this before the maintenance guys noticed anything wrong with the front door.  So the driver arrives and Bataleur goes off with him to get an MTN modem as the Airtel one was too slow while I baby sat the fixing of the front door.  The guy hammered and screwed and eventually took the whole door off it's hinges and planed and went crazy.  In the meantime I'm biting my nails wondering when he'd be done as the driver was coming back to get me so we could go to Shoprite.  I seriously needed to cook something.  I had my Wanna be Chef apron out already.

After about an hour and a half, Bateleur calls to tell me that they're waiting for me downstairs.  The guy quickly finished putting in some screws and then he had to sweep up the wood filings, taking so long.  It's like time works differently here.  There is no rush.  It takes some getting used to.  Our lives are such a rush always. Anyway, so we head out to Shoprite on a Saturday morning when all of Abuja is out on the road.  I took a photo of the traffic but it could be bad traffic anywhere so useless to post but believe me it was bad.  I didn't think it could get worse.  In the meantime the plan had changed as we found out there is also a Spar here.  It was great walking into Spar, almost like being home till you get to the fresh food section.  Even so, we ended up shopping so much, we didn't have enough cash, so Bateleur goes off to get some NGN3000.  About 10 minutes later he's back and I'm just so relieved that his back cause it's quite embarrassing to stand at the till with too little money.  The packer who had gone with him to show where the ATM was had borrowed him the money and we had to give it back to him.  So we pack up everything in the car and off he goes again to the nearest ATM only to find it had no cash.  We learnt another lesson on Saturday.  Most ATM's won't have cash on the weekend which was proved by the second ATM also not having cash.  In the meantime the driver had borrowed us the money to pay the packer so now we had to pay the driver.

We eventually got some cash at an ATM at one of the hotels and could pay our debt.  I'd asked the girl at the till at Spar where I could find fresh veggies and she told me to go to some market, I forgot the name.  I remembered it yesterday though, as I asked the driver to take me there. OH MY WORD, the traffic there was even worse as everybody was on their way to this market.  I managed to get some fresh green beans, carrots and green peppers, little tiny ones.  I wanted pumpkin, but I don't think they have pumpkins here.  I did see some butternut in Spar but they were all wrinkled up.  The drive back to our apartment didn't take long, thank goodness as by that time I just wanted to be in the apartment with no sound of hooters around me.

I remembered one very funny thing that happened on Fri when we went to Airtel to get modems.  Hubby and I had had a tiff and weren't on speaking terms.  So Richard, one of the workers at the apartments, so kindly gave us a lift to Airtel with his car.  Richard has long legs so there's only the tiniest little space between his seat and the back seat and I, silly me, gets in on the other side and hubby with his long legs has to get in behind Richard.  I wish I'd taken a photo of that, it was the funniest thing.  I knew he would be even more mad at me but I burst out laughing at the sight of his knees all squashed up.  I did ask if he wanted us to change seats, but he was too mad at me to wanna do that and preferred sitting all squashed up.