This is a
complete guide to recognising someone leaving the country for the first time,
but unsuccessfully trying very hard to make it seem like they travel as often
as diarrhoea patients run to the toilet. Leaving the shores of Nigeria for the
first time is not a bad thing, as all of us born here had our first time. But
for the ones that try to make it seem like they leave the country every
weekend, even though the closest they’ve come to leaving the shores of the
country, is their primary school excursion to the slave-trade port at Badagry,
this is the way to recognise them at the airport.
1. The ladies are on very tight high-heeled
shoes or sandals. Apparently, people that haven’t travelled don’t know that
when you go up up in the air, your skin expands, and your already tight shoes
suddenly become tighter. Heels are not comfortable in the sky, and believe me,
up in the air, comfort is the number one need. By then, that saying that that
geography teacher you detested so much in high school – the one whose cane
required four bottles of Robb ointment to cure- that saying that he drummed in
your ears, that popular saying that ‘the higher you go, the cooler it becomes’,
yes, that saying: it suddenly comes alive when you are up in the sky. And then,
you realise that contrary to your opinion, your geography teacher knew what he
was talking about after all. Put water or meat into the freezer and test it.
Did it expand? Yeah. That’s why people suddenly become magically fat in the
plane. They sleep thin, but they wake up three hours later to realise that it
is either their pencil-jeans has suddenly turned to broomstick-jeans, or Nanny
Mcphee has magically turned them from a lepa-toh-bad to a replica of Lepacious
Bose.
So any
traveller that doesn’t ditch the tight stilettos with six-inch pencil heels,
save it for the Friday night at the club, and instead buy the N500 colourful
rubber sandals they sell at Balogun market, knowing it sure costs less, because
comfort and cost are not directly proportional, believe me that person is sure
leaving the country for the first time.
2.
The guys have blings and baggy jeans and shirts, like the hip-hoppers they are aspiring
to be like. Because they have never left the country, they think everyone in
UK, US, Canada, etc., dresses the way they see in music videos, since that is
the closest encounter they have ever had with Hartsfield-Jackson airport. So
they dress this way, as they assume this will help them blend in quickly when
they get to their destination, without being noticed. Ehm… wrong!
They start
encountering their problems right from the rundown airport we have in Nigeria.
With each beep at the security check point, an ear stud or two, Snoop Dogg-ish
bling, heavy metallic wristwatch, giant skull belt, gigantic rings, chin studs,
even teeth stud, and other things that remind us of the things white men used
to shackle the bodies of our forefathers during the era of slave-trade – with
each beep, those things come down one by one. Bless your soul if the person is
a jean-sagger, we are left to see the already fallen jeans fall further down to
the knees, and are left with the full glare of multi-coloured brief of boxer
shorts.
Experienced
travellers try their best to travel light, especially when it comes to what
they wear on their bodies, but these ones make sure they visit the Ijebu
blacksmith, and wear all his converted raw materials on their body, just
because they want to travel and look like their mentors, T-Pain and Lil Wayne.
3. They are decked up to the tooth. They look
very on-point. Their hair is neatly-made, without a strand out of place. They
have their shades on, their lipstick doesn’t bleed. Spick and span is the word.
“We must baff up to the last, and
wear our best outfit” is the rule here. They look so good that they make it
look like travelling out of the country is an occasion they are going to, in
which they would meet President Obama, and all the important people in the
world there.
When you
see a guy wearing a very shiny leather jacket in July, or a lady wearing
spaghetti-strapped top in January, know that you have just encountered one. “We
must make an impression on these oyinbos,
we need to prove to them that not all of us are ugly monkeys” is the
mind-set here.
4. For families, all the kids wear and-co.
If you don’t know what and-co is, let me quickly explain. You remember how during
Christmas in the late eighties and early nineties, when our parents dressed us
in the identical ridiculously-looking cinderella-wannabe dresses that Tailor Kola
sewed, the ones that the net under the cloth was bought from aba market, and
painfully pricked our waists, the ones that had plenty gum-stay to make the fruit
patterns on our then-flat chests stay, the ones with the hideous-looking shoulder
pad? Yes, those ones we and all our cousins were made to wear, with them
looking exactly the same, the girls wearing the same, and guys wearing the
same, with the difference only in size? And God help us if Tailor Kola thought
four-year old Bola was actually a girl instead of a Boy. Come Christmas Day,
Bola would be pathetically made to dress exactly like his female cousins,
because on Christmas day, we must all wear the same cloth, anything else is a
taboo! Unfortunately, the mistake couldn’t have been discovered previously,
because no one was allowed to see the clothes before Christmas day, so that the
current year’s style could remain a secret. After this is very lengthy description
of what and-co clothes mean, I am sure you finally get the idea.
Back to the
main gist, this and-co phenomenon is more common when the family wins visa
lottery to the US. They dress the children alike. It doesn’t matter whether the
child is five months or 15 years old. They must all wear the same thing. Girls
dress alike, and so do the guys. The bigger the family, the more obvious the
and-co. As house-helps and cousins are not included in the benefit of Visa
Lottery, only father and mother are left to keep their eyes on four of five
kids. So in case, the stubborn goat of the family decides to stray from his fellow
future American citizens at the airport when his parents momentarily take their
eyes off him, his and-co uniform will serve as a great advantage in fishing him
out of the voracious crowd at the airport. I am not saying this is why they
wear and-co, but it is another sure way of recognising families leaving the
country for the first time.
5. They avoid asking questions, and end up
making the stupid mistakes. They try not to ask questions, because they
don’t want people to know they are travelling for the first time. They try to
look confident, in order to give the impression that they actually know what
they are doing. At the end, they are the ones with extra-luggage issues at the
check-in counter, the ones who after twenty minutes on a line, suddenly realise
that they are on the wrong queue. Sometimes, they even get to the presence of
the entry clearance officer at the destination airport before discovering that
they are supposed to pick and fill an immigration card, and they end up being
sent to the back of a 150-man queue.
Lastly, as
an added bonus, if you read these tips, and end up going around looking for
people that fall into this category, you are probably a first-timer yourself,
and are only trying to avoid falling into the trap of being tagged one.
And for
those people that escort their family friend who is travelling to UK to Murtala
Muhammed international airport, and get back home two hours later with an
American accent, well… we will treat that topic another time.
Now that you have read this very 'educative' piece of mine, I don't think I need to convince you too much to nominate my blog for the Best Writing Blog for 2012, and the Nigerian Blog of the Year 2012. After all, I don write for una tire this year oo (remember the Ewa Aganyin, The script writer, Milkeyes, The Atheist, Almighty's Formula, The God of Visas, Internet Celebrity, Not Another Statistic... and loads of other blockbuster articles I can't even begin to count that I have served you guys as hot dish this year).
Oya, please, ayam begging you, head over to this link and nominate me for the two categories I mentioned. http://nigerianblogawards.com/register.php. It is closing this sunday, 23 Sept, 2012, so please, do it as soon as you read this post. After nominating (me), they will send you and email to confirm your nomination. If you don't see the email, please, check your spam mail, it will be there. If you don't do this, the nomination won't count o.
Thanzabunsh
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