Happy New Year 2009!

Jelly Coconut

The past couple of days have continued the movie watching madness. It's been great having access to TV movie channels. All those moving pictures and things lol I haven't owned a TV in years, but sometimes it's just what's needed. We watched our way through:

• Just My Luck (pretty bad)
• It's a Boy Girl Thing (awful)
• Fame (classic but hasn't aged well)
• Sweet Bird of Youth (not bad)
• The Interpreter (pretty good)
• Dazed and Confused (my goodness, is that really Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck!?)

New Year's Eve we watched Later With Jools Holland back-to-back. I think they were playing all the episodes from the past couple of years or something. It was great :)

We ate jelly coconut, which is a really young coconut that you cut open at the top, then drink the water. Because it's a young coconut, the actual white nut inside hasn't formed yet and you just get a thin layer of white jelly, which you scrape out and eat. Refreshing.

A friend had also given us roast chicken coated in very hot peanut sauce. It was delicious. Washed it down with ginger beer, then vanilla ice-cream covered in Baileys for afters.

At midnight, Hirut and I cracked open a bottle of champagne and shared it with the guards whilst we got ready to go out. By 1:30 we were at Old School, another club up in the hills. Apparently, most people are in Church at midnight to 'start the year with God', but they're all checking their watches. The minute it strikes, they run home, change, and head out clubbing.

We had a great night and boogied away until about 5am when we tumbled into bed and slept until the afternoon - today. Eventually, we summoned up the energy to call a driver to take us to Lakka Beach. It was about an hour-and-a-half drive through Freetown, out into some of the really poor districts. It was interesting to see. Shacks of concrete, wood, and sometimes just sticks, with plastic bags tied over them. Stark contrast to the house I've been living in the past couple of weeks.

Lakka Beach and Hard Rock

Zonked out on Hard Rock

We saw mango trees, bread fruit trees with huge leaves, and another type with big round green fruit, which Hirut said young girls were told not to look at lest they grow up flat-chested lol

The beach itself was home to SL's version of Hard Rock Café. Literally. A giant pile of volcanic rocks in the sea with a café on it. You climb up on the rocks from the beach and watch the sunset. So, we did that for a couples of hours. Loads of couples hiding out there, making out, and young lads smoking weed. Hundreds of people gathering for a beach party.

By the time we left it was getting dark, and the traffic was surprisingly bad for a dirt track in the middle of nowhere. We got caught in a jam for about an hour and the air was thick with red dust. It's the season in SL where Sahara winds blow through the country bringing heat and sand.

Lots of the houses had red Xs painted on them. The driver explained this meant that they were 'illegal houses' and eventually the government, should it ever get organised enough to do so, would knock them down. Entire districts with red crosses on. Some very fine houses I guess were abandoned during the war and are now home to squatters. There's lots of stuff like that. The water pipes are made of rubber. In poor districts people just cut the pipe to get water, so you see rivers running down streets. There's no billing system and no other way for people to get water. It's a constant problem for the government: cut off water and people get ill, or keep supplying it free and no one will ever want to pay.