The Rocky Road through Togo: Food Breathes Salty

It has been a while, in US terms anyway, since I have updated this. What has happened in the mean time you wonder? Fun and games on the farm have included lifting the ATV off my dad after he flipped it and patching my parents' roof. I quickly remember why I am no longer in construction. I rented a car last weekend and drove up to Detroit for D's birthday and Labor Day. That was a lot of fun.

Driving here is one thing. Driving here in traffic is something else. There is traffic in Lome. But it is civilized. Or chaotic to the point that it engenders good manners. Here you are caught in the quandary of being nice, driving defensively, and merging like your car is constructed of egg shells. Like everyone else on the road. Hence, no one gets anywhere. Too many rules.

iPhone update: I got myself the Google Map app for my phone since one of the main reasons why I own a smart phone is so that something can tell me where I am. Anyway, I was getting ready to leave for Detroit and I punched D's address into the app to see what route to take. A "start" button popped up so I hit it. Because I hit whatever buttons pop up on my screen just because. Probably a bad habit. Anyway, I hit start. And this sultry voice booms from my phone "in 500 feet, turn right on to . . . " I almost dropped my phone down the stairs. I am not even joking. But she got me to Detroit in good time.

D's parents took us to a Tigers game. That was a lot of fun. We ate a lot of peanuts. And saw a lot of entertaining baseball.

I like having BBC and Al-Jazeera in my pocket all the time. Except when the US is contemplating bombing Another country and I inwardly cringe and imagine what my friends in Togo are saying. I am sort of glad I am not there right now and in the position of being the resident American who has to explain away all the stupid shit in this country.

I may have said this before, but life here is so freaking stressful. And we have few mechanisms for dealing with said stress except for escapist pursuits. The worst part about stress here is how freaking trivial most of it is. Or abstract. Here I am stressed about student loans, in Togo I was stressed about feeding myself dinner. At the moment I was stressing out about having dropped a $42 bucket of adhesive off the roof into my mom's flower bed someone in the world was stressing out about not having the means to buy medicine for her sick child. I drove 350 miles yesterday on pristine (comparatively speaking) roads and stressed out about traffic. Granted a lot of this traffic was traveling at about 70 mph scant feet from my face, but seriously. I've ridden in cars with gas tanks in the engine compartment and whose brake pads fell out.

That didn't stress me out. But scratching my rental did. Go figure.

Food here is so salty. I feel like I am eating the sea any time I get a sandwich from somewhere. Like everything tastes salty to me. I never noticed this before.

I just uploaded most of my pictures on to this computer. Something like 3500 pictures. Here are a couple more of them: