Theres a parrot in the lobby of the hotel and his name is Cocot. He's and African grey, a little on the small side, with a red tail feather and a little voice that says bonjour. Yesterday I was hovering around his cage and when he noticed my attentions, he put his head up against the aide of the cage. I stuck my fingers through the bars and petted his prehistoric head, getting his parrot dust all over my fingers. The petting went on for quite some time and as I moved my fingers around his white eye patch he turned his head and closed his strong sharp beak over the first joint in my index finger. I waited a moment for him to let go, but then had to use my other hand to pry open his jaw. Do you know what Cocot means in Slovak?
We decided to move to another hotel. Just to be clear, it had nothing to do with the parrot, but with the itchy sheets and hefty price of our rooms. Jen, David and I went to check out a nearby guesthouse. Many of the streets in lome are paved with sand, and as David observed, this gives the town a beach resort like feel. It was Sunday too so there was something quiet and grave about the place. We came across a group of people singing and dancing in the road and then later, walked by a choral mass at church.
After meeting up again with te boys, we went for a giant lunch and sampled a few interesting African dishes, whose names I have of course forgotten. One of them was a sort of manioc CPUs cous and the other was a silken dumplings type thing. We returned to our house to get settled in and discovered that the water was not running, much to my disappointment. Johnothan fetched us water from the well and Marie cut up our watermelon.
In the evening we saw some amazing live music at a very cool club called le "54" blues reggae and so forth. There was pizza. Sunday pizza.
This morning the sun is more obscured than usual, there's a thick haze in the sky. The other day, nico pointed at the sky in the early evening and asked "is that the sun or the moon"? it's really hard to tell sometimes.
do not be surprised (you probably aren't) that the sunday pizza ritual has been transfered to africa. many of these things are so much more portable than first imagined.
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