Three things happened between yesterday and today in Cannes, and I don't know which is more newsy. You will have to figure it out for yourself:
We met a Nigerian lady who has lived here for 16 years (there are not up to 10 Nigerians that she knows of in this city), we got lost and I ate pork meat, in that order.
First, the lady is from Edo State, Nigeria and was brought to Cannes, France, by her late father. She, in turn, brought over her sister after the death of her father. It turned out NBC staff discovered her a couple of years ago and worked out an arrangement for her to be providing them with food, at a fee, to save them from having to eat what they are not used to. The arrangement worked well for both parties; she got a little business running during the few days they were there by operating a mobile restaurant and they enjoyed Nigerian food on foreign land. That was the arrangement I found on the ground and I saw no reason why I should deviate from that.
Secondly, after closing from the venue of the event yesterday, three of us left earlier and decided to trek back to our hotel, which was about 45 minutes away, so that we could do a little sight seeing along the way. To our greatest surprise, we got lost...We kept on going round and round...and stubbornly, we refused to take a taxi, believing that the hotel would be in the next turn, only to find out it was not. We asked a couple of people who only succeeded in confusing us the more. I suggested we go to a nearby police station and ask them but my friend said there was no way he was going to enter a police station in a foreign country.
Finally, I saw a lone, beautiful, French girl, sitting by the roadside all by herself, her head buried in her phone. I crossed the road to ask her for direction to the hotel. Two things happened simultaneously: she looked up at me fearfully, a black man on a lonely road and a car pulled up in the middle of the road and the driver (I soon found out it was her father) looked to see what I was going to do to her, presumably. Meanwhile, my colleagues remained on the other side of the road. I quickly disarmed them by smiling and bringing out the card holding the hotel key which had the name, address and even a map of the road leading to the hotel. She looked at it and referred me to her father. I handed the card over to him. He tried to describe the direction to us in faltering English, mixing it with words in French which I couldn't understand. In the end, he volunteered to take us there. I was surprised at the kind gesture. This is something I noticed with those people. All the ones we asked tried very much to be helpful. I didn't expect that kind of kindness from them.
Thirdly, when I came down from my room to eat my breakfast at the hotel restaurant this morning, I was so carried away and enticed by the look of the fresh sausage that I forgot to do "due diligence" by asking what the sausage was made of as I usually do in a foreign country. It was a buffet, and I went round and selected what I wanted before settling down to eat. I could never resist sausage whenever it was a buffet. After taking a bite at one, which I washed down with coffee, it suddenly dawned on me that it looked different from the usual brown sausage I normally eat. This one was pinkish, rather than brown. So I called a waiter and asked him. He looked at me and asked whether I was a Muslim and I said yes. He said, "No, you shouldn't take it, it's pork". Wow! I didn't know whether to vomit it out or what...