two's company

Well, I made it through about one minute of my first Christmas song this season before the tears set in.  The plan was to set up the tree this weekend; maybe I'll feel less weepy after all the endorphins set in from my ten-mile run tomorrow morning.  In the meantime, Joey poured me a glass of red wine.

On a lighter note, I thought I'd share a funny story from a few weeks ago.  We celebrated Thanksgiving early, the Sunday before, since we'd be in Cape Town on the actual holiday.  Between the three couples, we had most of the necessary components of a Thanksgiving dinner, but we still had to do a little shopping. 

Grocery shopping in Abuja is kind of like a scavenger hunt; you never know what you're going to find or where you might find it.  All five grocery stores might have bean sprouts one week, but the following week when you want to make Pad Thai, bean sprouts are nowhere to be found.  So the day before our dinner, Joey, Lena and I made our way through four of the grocery stores in town in search of the various ingredients.  We were almost successful; we couldn't find cranberries, but we did manage to find a version of everything else.

Our last stop was the fruit and vegetable market we frequent, where we stopped to pay way too much for apples and buy some fresh herbs for the turkey.  We always visit the same stand; the little guy there calls us his customers and usually doesn't screw us too much on the prices.  Actually, the little guy, let's call him Abdul, is probably at least 30, but if it weren't for his teeth, you'd think he was about 12.

We parked the car by our regular stand, and Joey got out first.  Lena and I followed.  Abdul looked at Joey, then he looked at me, and then he looked at Lena.  He looked back at Joey, back at me, and then to Lena one more time.  Then Abdul's eyes grew as big as saucers and in his high-pitched voice he exclaimed:

"You have TWO wives?!"

Oh God.

We laughed hysterically, joked that yes, Joey has two wives, and then tried to explain that actually, no, Lena was not Joey's second wife.

Abdul was not to be persuaded.  He looked at me and said, "You are the Abuja wife."  Then he looked at Lena and said, "And you are from London!"  (London seems to be the only place that most people know outside of Nigeria - sufficiently far away I guess for his mind to reconcile why he'd never seen her before.)

Abdul was so excited we could hardly convince him to sell us produce.  He kept high-fiving and fist-bumping Joey and saying, "I want two wives!"

So Lena and I decided we are now sister wives.  I am the bush wife and she is the city wife.  Sounds like Joey's got a pretty good arrangement.