In transit part 2: the 9ja connexion

So, no posts in a while.  I guess that figures - once I have steady and fast internet connectivity, you can count on it to distract me so thoroughly that I lose track of the world and thus fail to do useful and worthwhile things, as they get crowded out by flash games and such.

And so in other news, I'm in Nigeria.  Ibadan, Lead City university.  Everyone says it's pronounced like 'leed', but I'm not convinced that it's justified.  Maybe Ibadan is one of the world's largest lead producers.  I mean, probably it's not so, but still.

But I digress.  Really, what happened is I was sitting and having a beer whilst writing those 2 paragraphs, and then other people came in and I got distracted.


Anyway, I'm in Nigeria for this thing called the African Linguistics School, which is a really awesome program that has the aim of bringing the modernest linguistic theory to students in Africa, where not-so-great education funding situations and huge costs of bringing stuff from Europe and North America make it hard to keep up with the latest developments in the field.
In practice, it's like halfway between linguist summer camp in Africa, and a super intense research-driven teaching workshop.  It's 2 weeks long, and I'm now in between the two of them, and so far things have been pretty good.  More on that later.  If you talk to me.
It's also cool to meet lots of new people working on African languages.  A lot of them turn out to have connections to a lot of other people I know, which is neat.  For instance, I met this dude Reggie, who apart from being a generally cool guy and sharp syntactician, was at Rhodes for a dissertation completion fellowship just before we arrived.  So he's all asking me about the students I see every day, and whether I frequent the bar up the the street, etc.  The point, I guess, is that the world seems small.
The picture at the top of this post is, admittedly, not a very exciting one.  Unless you like "33" lager.  [I checked the label – it does not contain 33 things.  I have no idea where the name came from.]
But the weekend excursion was to a place called Abeokuta, which WAS really cool.  Except for the part where it rained while we were trying to climb up the giant rock at the top of the hill.
But it made for some mildly cool pictures, two of which I'll post here.  The rest will come later.  Also, there was a trip to the zoo, where everyone wanted to pose for pictures with the pale-faces.

[Edit: So, as soon as I tried to upload those pictures, a lovely message comes up from something called "MySmile", helpfully informing me (and everyone else here) that the data allowance for the connection has been used up, and that more money must be paid.  A day later, this has actually happened. I have spent this day (well really, the night portion of it) being pretty sick, alongside my suite-mate Hedde – apparently spending Friday night out on the town may