Despite what Dad and M. think, I neither saw any yellow cake nor did I met the sender of all those emails about funds trapped in a bank after a political upheaval.
During our final descent over Niamey I kept thinking "where is Niamey? All I see is dust". I was greeted at the airport by my coworker and then we proceeded to spend 2 hours attempting to get our box of materials extricated from the confines of customs. This entailed going to three different unlabeled offices and climbing around in a giant cage looking for our package. Given the condition of the other stuff in the cage, clearly Niamey is where parcels go to die. Noted to carry on anything I needed in the future.
What struck me first about Niger is that I am no big deal. Usually when a very obvious foreigner (read: white person) is walking around in a place they clearly don't belong, they get some attention. However in Niger, nobody even looks up. Everyone is too busy with their own stuff to care that I'm around. We all just mind our own business, which is sort of nice, if not particularly welcoming.
In my week there I got a good handle on all the basics: food, lodging, transpo, and money.
FOOD
Food was interesting. Let's preface by saying I live with a vegan and therefore eat a lot of vegetables. I can safely say that the only vegetable I ate during my entire week in Niger were tiny green peas that clearly came from a can. I don't blame the veggies- this is not a happy climate for cultivation. It was about 104 degrees every day and dry and dusty. Not exactly fertile grounds. I also have never eaten so much red meat. Large slab of meat and french fries was pretty standard (and no I am not counting french fries as a vegetable).
LODGING
The hotel where I made an electronic reservation AND called the day before to confirm apparently has a different definition of reservation than I do. They informed me that I do have a five day reservation with them but I'll have to leave and go to another hotel on Day 3 but am welcome back on Day 4. FT. Went to what I like to call "the people's hotel". In Niamey, there are two big fancy hotels where all the expats stay, surrounded by nice restaurants and taxis that charge 5 times what everyone else does. We did not stay at that type of hotel. I liked the place where we ended up though- what it lacked in cleanliness and modernity it made up for in the friendliness of staff. By Day 2 the receptionist was asking me for advice on getting pregnant. No luck trying to explain that I'm not a doctor but I think my pretty basic advice might have done the trick...
TRANSPO
Each country has their own way of doing taxis and Niger's involves standing on the road and yelling out where you want to go and eventually someone pulls over and lets you in with four other people. No matter where you go it costs 50 cents. I have no idea how taxi drivers fill their tanks with gas but I do sort of like the strategy involved in trying to keep you taxi full at all times with passengers going different places. You have to shrug off the brutal rebuffs when you want to go somewhere that is not in their plan. Only trick is figuring out which side of the street to shout your destination from. Thankfully the guard at the hotel was pretty nice about directing me to one side or the other every morning.
MONEY
I was carrying about 3k in cash with me because ATMs and credit cards aren't so popular in Niger. When I think about it I shudder... I don't even like having more that $50 on me in NYC. However, between my colleague and myself, hired cars and hotel bills, we burned through it pretty quickly. However, before burning through it, we had to change it. I hate banks. I really hate African banks. Lots of ambiguous lines and everyone around you can see what you're doing. So here we were changing $100 bills (and only brand new ones with the big heads, bc the other ones are suspected to be counterfeit) which is significantly more than the average monthly income here. And worse, the exchange rate was about 500 to 1 so $100 dollars ends up being A LOT of bills. Also not sure if the guy with the machine gun at the entrance to the bank makes me feel safer or not. Even worse was when money got wired to me because the Western Union man made me COUNT EVERY BILL before he'd let me sign for it. He also ran out of large bills so it was all in 5000 CFA notes. The stack was about 4 inches high. I felt like a total shmuck counting out that kind of money in the 9th poorest country in the world.
So yeah, Niger, the basics.
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