After snoozing my alarm three times, I finally wake up thirty minutes behind schedule and dash to the bathroom. I have what my mum used to call a ‘Duck Fowl’ bath. When we were younger she’d take one look at us and say, ‘go back into that bathroom and start all over again’. She does that until she's sure we are clean. Forgive my digression.

I have a premonition about how my day is going to go when I try to fasten my zipper and it is bad. *&^%%@!! I curse and wake my sister who had been gracious enough to do my ironing the night before. ‘Why didn’t you tell me the zip was bad?’ She looks at me with dazed eyes for a moment and just lay back down. I feel like a mumu. I slip into a dress-top and since I'm travelling to a very conservative place, complete the look with skinny jeans to cover my exposed legs.
I go out to get a cab and find none and I'm running very late for my flight. I decide to drive myself to the airport, park the car there and get it when I return. It costs a hundred bucks per hour and I plan to return the same day so, no biggie.

I make it through screening with my perfume still in my bag, yay!. If the lady at the desk hadn’t been so distracted, she would have seen it and forced me to go check it in. Phew! I exhale, block my ears with earphones and squirm in my chair to Ice Prince's ‘Oleku’. And then I hear an announcement but by the time the phones are off my ear, I've missed it. I ask those sitting beside me what the announcer had said but they are as clueless as I am. I decide to keep my ears open and wait for the next announcement. It comes. It is the last boarding call for, yup, you guessed right, my flight. I’m still puzzled as to how I managed to miss three boarding announcements.

I get on the flight and my seat mate is a fine boy, no pimples. I say good morning, and settle down, thankful that I won’t have a bald, pot-bellied business man who’d take up all his space and half of mine and still have the effrontery to snore throughout the flight. And to make matters worse, at the end of the flight, he’d turn and smile at me and say, ‘Nne, you look so pretty. Can I have your number?’

Impressionable young man I must tell you-the fine boy no pimples that is. We gist and I laugh heartily until I ask if he lives in Kano and he says no, he is stopping at Abuja. What?!!! We are stopping over at Abuja first? My colleague had offered to buy my ticket and I was only too glad to give him the pay and tick ‘done’ on my to-do list. My colleague didn't bother to tell me I would be stopping over at Abuja. I resign myself to the forces that be and open Baingana’s ‘Tropical Fish’. Her sense of humour is as wicked as mine and in no time I get weird glances from fine boy and co ‘cos I’m laughing so hard. I stop laughing when we get to Abuja and my phone rings...

Continued on my blog: http://naomilucas..com/2013/01/naomi-goes-to-kano-2.html

©Naomi Lucas