A beautiful day

Holy moly it's hot outside! A gorgeous day for a walk down to the bakery to pick up a little pizza for lunch and a meat-filled pastry. Yum.

There's this one street that I take to get to the bakery that has my favourite house on it... the front of the house is filled with flowering trees and with the heat and humidity today the flowers smelled sooooooo good...

Thought about more stuff that I miss from home:
- drinking water straight out of the tap! i hate how many bottles of water i'm going through right now... Planet! I'm soooo sorry!!!
- taking walks... sigh. Cotonou is uber-polluted so taking a walk around the block isn't quite pleasant. And if the exhaust fumes don't get ya, the flies and mosquitoes will.
- grocery stores. the markets are fun n' all, but i miss going to ONE store and finding everything I need. Like meat. The market is good if I want to kill my own though! eep! (no, that's not true, you can find ANYTHING at the market... from hair extensions to extension cords to live chickens to carrots and herbs! I FOUND HERBS!!) too bad i don't have a freezer to store the meat in! how do people live with a bar fridge??!
- breathing. Mathieu has a motorcycle and riding around with exhaust in your face is just gross. On a good day Cotonou's air quality is probably like Toronto's when it's been 35° for 4 days straight. barf. someone send oxygen, stat! The beach offers some respite, but going to the beach on my lunch hour is difficult on account of getting bothered by random men when I go alone and after work I often go to the gym with Mathieu... so I guess I'll breathe on weekends or when I travel...

I also miss my shoes and wish I'd brought more pants. I've discovered that sweating is better than mosquitoe bites and my swollen and itchy feet are eased by wearing socks.

Guess who's going to bed with socks on. Had the best night of sleep in a long time last night! weeee socks!

Random Entry, Things I Forgot to Pack (aka the Golden Floss)

I forgot to pack dental floss. I have a tooth ache and figured out I'd gotten food stuck between my teeth. I think it's pork... it must be. Anyway, they serve this dish with a small piece of pork, and it's really tough and you kinda have to rip it apart with your fingers and then chew like crazy and you get tons of stuff stuck in your teeth... I'm really not used to it!

I'm hoping that when I ask them if they know what "de la soie dentaire" is, they won't stare at me blankly. I used the string from a tea bag... lol - necessity, right? As I was walking to the bathroom with my little tea bag string, I thought to myself, "this might be the best or the worst idea you've ever had."

Well, it worked, and I dislodged the chunk of whatever-it-was from under my tooth, then rinsed my mouth out properly with salt water, to disinfect, and I'll keep disinfecting every hour, and see how it feels in the morning. Hopefully I can find floss on my way home from work tonight so I can clean my teeth properly every day. This is not a place I want to have a dental emergency...

update: yup, I got the blank stare. My colleague suggested we hit a pharmacy, and the first pharmacy suggested we hit the mother-pharmacy. So we went... :( I had to pay $10 for freaking dental floss. But I got pizza for dinner so I feel happy again. :)