Category: Nigeria, Ghana, 2015

The Day After

January 3

Up for breakfast with the Kipharts at the hotel. Some of the young people at the wedding, including Ayo, the groom, Dayo, the bride’s sister, and Tobi, the bride’s brother, come by to visit. They partied until 3 or 4 AM, but look no worse the wear for it. Ah, youth.

So, maybe this is a good time to tell you a bit about the Olopade children. Feyi, the bride, is the eldest. A graduate of Penn and Harvard Business School, she an entrepeneur, working on developing a shareable cancer data base. Dayo has just graduated with a joint degree from Yale Law School and it’s School of Management (the business school) and will take the NY bar next month. She took time off from Yale to write a fascinating book, called Africa:The Bright Continent, which I highly recommend. The “baby”, Tobi, who is 6’3″, was completing his applications to business schools–Stanford, Harvard and Wharton–by the poolside, and needed to rush back to his job at Credit Suisse in New York. He speaks fluent Chinese. A bit intimidating, eh?

We and Susie and Dick had a driver (and an escort and a guard) who drove us into Lagos, through the large, bustling market. Were it not so hot (99F), we might have wandered on foot, but, as it is, we were content to drive through in air conditioned comfort. Here are a few photos taken from the van:

 

We next drove to the National Museum, a small, rather poorly lit and air conditioned building. It was, however, very well organized, with six rooms stretching from birth through reincarnation. The guide was well-versed on the artifacts and gave us a very interesting tour in just under an hour, explaining the traditions and beliefs behind the artifacts and costumes. Very well worth the stop.

We returned to the Blow Fish Hotel, a comfortable small hotel that is dominated by young wedding guests, with whom we chat freely. We go out by the pool to eat a quite delicious buffet lunch in the shade. After lunch, we rest in the room, then go back down by the pool for more conversation with bright young wedding guests from Africa and the US.

We and the Kipharts pass in the planned dinner, which probably won’t get going until at least 9PM, and instead walk to a modest African restaurant for an acceptable, but unexceptional, dinner. We return to the hotel where, if I’m successful in solving the problems I’ve been having with the blog, you’ll be able to read this post.

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