“Red Wine in Straw”. 1.

I am at a local bar in Espargos.

I’m having some “Super Bock” beer.

The beer bottles in Cape Verde are weird. First they’re small. Like, the regular beer comes in this very small bottle. It’s like a mini-beer. The first time I was served one at a bar, I was very surprised by it.

Hm, why is it so small?

Second, the caps are weird.

Usually glass bottles have these metal caps that you take off with like a bottle opener and stuff. But these ones have this miniature can-tab type mechanism on their metal bottle caps.

So like, imagine opening a soda can. Now imagine doing that on the tiny metal cap of a glass bottle. Exactly.

Like, What?

What?

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I’m not quite sure how this evening will go.

I’m with my backpack, which has my essential belongings. All my belongings really. I don’t have so much stuff. Oh and then there’s the small propane cylinder. The smallest-sized type. I use that to cook. It’s the only thing I have, which doesn’t fit into the backpack.

I decided to move from the space where I stay at Santa Maria. I heard Mohammed recently got a comfy space in Espargos. I don’t exactly know how comfy, but I heard and was curious. And so I figured I might as well also give Espargos a shot. Plus, it’s exhilarating just packing your things and heading out, not sure how things are going to end up. I think it’s really more that, than anything else.

I had to return Toure’s white keg.

Toure is my next-door neighbour. Toure and Camara. They are both from Guinea Conakry. Camara has a smallish stature, and a relatively high-pitched voice. I think he works security somewhere, but I’m not entirely sure. Probably at one of the hotels. Practically everyone in Santa Maria works at the hotels. Or at least they work in hospitality somehow.

Camara doesn’t speak so much English. He’s primarily proficient in French. French is Guinea Conakry’s lingua franca, being one of the countries in French West Africa.

Due to the language barrier, Camara and I don’t exchange too many actual words. We interact every now and then, and there’s a lot of sign and body language.

He says a lot of “Cool ahn?”

Which is like, “That’s cool right?”

He pronounces the “Cool” like “Kul”. The “K” is very pronounced, and the “u” is very short. I think it’s amusing.

Toure is considerably taller than Camara. He has a somewhat muscular build. He speaks more English. We talk.

Haha, Toure is a cool guy.

He sells souvenirs to the tourists at Santa Maria.

We talk about travel, and our different countries of origin. We talk about Europe. He has dreams of immigrating to Europe. They all do. Everybody here. Every one of my neighbours. A lot of them see their time in Cape Verde as hopefully being a stopover between Africa and Europe.

For some reason, my own thinking is the other way around. I spent the second half of the previous year in Berlin as a student. I spent the year before that in the USA. And now I’m here in Cape Verde. By choice. To some extent at least.

I have a Nigerian passport, and so travel is very constrained by visas amongst other things. My USA student visa will expire soon. I don’t know if I’ll be resuming studies after this gap year. I don’t think so. I’m anxious about my future and the uncertainty it’s shrouded in, but for some reason I don’t see immigration to the West as the solution to my problems. For some reason.

My French West African neighbours find me odd. Very odd. I speak English. Considerably well. Left to them, I should be a tour guide. I could be making a lot of money from the tourists. I must be immensely stupid for not capitalising on such an opportunity. Practically none of the tourists in Cape Verde speak French as a first language. And so this makes communication strained for the guys who primarily speak French.

They honestly find my stupidity inestimable. Left to them, I should go find a sixty year old German woman who’ll be impressed with how hard I can fuck her, and hope and pray to Allah that she decides to take me back to Germany with her. That is exactly what I would do if I was smart.

If I wasn’t in such an uncertain situation, I would’ve found that suggestion unthinkably hilarious. However given the anxieties of my position, I just find it infuriating. And a little scary.

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A while back Toure was telling me about his girlfriend. She was from Nigeria. She worked in a shop somewhere in Santa Maria. She had just brought him some homemade lunch that afternoon.

Mayowa you see, this girl, she like me so much.

In his deep voice, and with his smiling face.

Every time always calling me. Always say Toure Toure, how are you, why you no come see me since, she like me so much.

And then he told me about his girlfriend before that. Also from Nigeria.

You see, I just get the luck with the Nigerian women you know.

Hahahahaha. Toure Toure!

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I had to return Toure’s white plastic keg. He gave it to me when I needed a container to store drinking water. Every now and then I would go get it filled with water for about a hundred escudos at the funtunario.

The funtunario is really just a bunch of taps with running water, adjacent to the clothing market. I don’t know why people refer to it by such a fancy-sounding name.

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I am still at the local bar in Espargos. Drinking Strela mini-beer.

There’s this swing-set thing outside. Like a mini playground. I spent some time hanging out there.

I am now in conversation with someone. Some guy. A Cape Verdean. We’re discussing. At some point we talk about what I’m doing in Espargos. I mention that I’m on a journey from Santa Maria. And that I’ve got my belongings in my backpack. We talk some more. At some point he offers to host me for the night.

Don’t worry. Don’t worry. You can stay in my house. You come to my house to sleep. Don’t worry.

He’s very kind. He’s a very cheerful guy, laughing and exchanging banter with the waitress and the other people at the bar.

I’m touched by his offer.

I feel like Cape Verdeans can be very very generous. Like, very very. And gradually I’ve been getting accustomed to their initially surprising generosity and welcoming nature.

I say okay. I take my time to express appreciation.

We keep talking and chilling.

Hm. It seems like a roof over my head for the night is sorted out at this point.

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Image: Somewhere on the streets of Santa Maria. A bunch of people betting money on the outcome of dice rolls.

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This post is one in a series. The other pieces in the series can be accessed here.

A Story of a Hungry Gap-Year Student and some Untouched Hotel Food.

It is an afternoon on the island of Sal.

I am headed somewhere.

Maybe to find some electricity to charge my computer.

Maybe.

I am headed somewhere to do something.

My computer is in my backpack.

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I am hungry. I am immensely hungry.

I have not had a decent meal in a good while.

Usually my sense of personal pride and agency is sustenance enough to withstand the discomfort of physical hunger.

But every now and then, even that gets depleted.

And then I resort to my tagline:

Hello, I’m a student on a gap year from college in the US. Do you think you could help me with some money?

Usually people are sympathetic. Cape Verdean natives are generally very generous. Not with money- not really, because they themselves might not have so much to spare. But with empathy, with goodwill, with food, with company, and with alcohol.

Usually the problem with generous Cape Verdean men playing board games at local bars, is that I end up with a hangover the next morning- From drinking ill-advised amounts of Grogue– their unfamiliar rum.

Tourists generally have more money to spare, but I’m even less inclined to ask them for money because usually they’re Europeans on vacation in the Cape Verdean islands. And so there’s a perspective from which it’s really just some disadvantaged Black guy- You know, just one of the innumerable disadvantaged Black people in the news, asking some White guy for money.

I think that’s an immensely horrible picture. And it’s just absolutely horrendous imagining myself as the disadvantaged Black guy happily receiving Aid.

I’d rather just stay hungry.

I don’t enjoy having to depend on people’s sympathy, and so I usually avoid employing that “Gap year student” tagline.

But every now and then, push comes to shove and I have to admit the reality of my current financial situation.

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I am hungry. I am immensely hungry.

I am walking through a cobblestoned walkway in Odjo D’Agua hotel.

Odjo D’Agua is a four-star hotel on a rocky promontory of Praia D’Antonio Souza- Sal island’s southern beach.

I think it’s a really interesting hotel. It’s owned by a Cape Verdean native. I don’t know for certain that he owns the hotel, but it’s not unlikely. He definitely feels like someone with the means. Plus, he does not have the air of an employee. He moves with the air of someone who built something from scratch. Or maybe it’s just me.

I think Odjo D’Agua is really interesting, and I’m particularly fond of it because it’s the most prominent Cape Verdean hotel on the island. It’s the most prominent one which actually aims to promote Cape Verdean culture and tradition, in addition to providing a luxurious hotel experience.

Pretty much all of the other renowned hotels are foreign. They’re also really interesting, I’ve spent some time exploring a few. I just think it’s important for a good proportion of the most prominent hotels to be locally-owned, and designed to promote the native culture. Like, what’s the point of even spending time in a country if you aren’t going to soak in as much of the culture as you can.

I was in a conversation with his younger brother- The hotel owner’s younger brother, at his own restaurant in Espargos earlier in the year: Caldera Preta.

Caldera Preta. Black Pot. That’s the name of the restaurant.

Odjo D’Agua means Sea View.

It was my first time meeting him. I picked up the menu, wondering what to order. A dark-skinned man in a light white beard turned to me and said “Sorry, we don’t have pizza today”. In case I was thinking of ordering pizza.

We began to engage in conversation. Interesting guy.

At some point he mentioned his older brother- who I didn’t know at the time, and some issues he was facing with directing tourist streams towards his hotel.

A lot of the foreign-owned hotel chains in Cape Verde have their visitors book all-inclusive stays. So you’ve got tourists coming in from Europe and the US, booking their stay at these foreign-owned hotels- complete with food, island tours, recreation, etc, before even stepping foot into the country. And so most of the money they’re ever going to spend while in Cape Verde, is going to be spent inside these foreign hotels.

Of course that’s a problem for locally-owned hotels who do not have as much of an established presence, both online and in the scene of international tourism. Or locally-owned restaurants who don’t experience as much patronage because the tourists have all their gastronomic needs met in their walled-in, all-inclusive hotels.

Impecunious gap year student that I am, I definitely empathise with the local business-owners.

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I am walking through a cobblestoned walkway in Odjo D’Agua hotel.

I am walking by the dining area, which is separated by some palm trees and decorative plants.

The owner of the hotel is having a meal. He seems to be having a date with some woman.

She looks very young. Relative to him at least. She looks like she’s in her thirties. The Odjo D’Agua guy on the other hand, must be at least Seventy. Or sixty-something.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a date. Maybe they’re just having lunch. Maybe I’m just reading into things.

I keep walking.

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Not so long ago, I was having a conversation with a tourist couple from the UK on the Santa Maria pier. The man was mentioning to his wife about the fibreglass job on one of the fishermen’s boats, and how it was similar to that on their own boat in the UK.

I was curious what fibreglass was, and they seemed like friendly people so I asked them a question.

We ended up talking for about thirty minutes on the pier.

We talked about the man’s profession and his career decisions, we talked about their recent Safari vacation in I think, Tanzania. When I mentioned I was studying Computer Science in the US, he told me the husband of one of his daughters worked in Tech, and was doing VERY WELL. Like, VERY WELL in Caps.

That’s one aspect of the entire conundrum I’m grappling with during this gap year. Everyone says Tech is a great professional domain to venture into. I’ve got the skillset for it, but I don’t feel like that’s the path for me. Usually people are primarily concerned about the financial prospects of a career path. That’s usually enough motivation to forge ahead. For some reason I’m not really like that.

How am I like? What am I like? I don’t know. That’s why I’m here on some island in Cape Verde with no money in the first place. To figure things out.

At some point our conversation touched on the Odjo D’Agua hotel. The man said they had been vacationing in Cape Verde for a number of decades. He said initially the entire southern beach of Sal island used to be empty. There was nothing there. No one. No businesses, no restaurants, no Windsurfing schools, nothing. Just the Odjo D’Agua hotel.

I found the span of his perspective immensely interesting. That was something a person my age would just like, never know. Just because they weren’t alive or usefully sentient back then. That was something I could really only learn from talking to someone much older than me.

Given that one piece of information, it was very possible to visualise the trend of business-population formation on the beach over time. Initially it was just the Odjo D’Agua guy. And then as both the tourist numbers and the awareness of tourism as a stream of national income increased, businesses gradually began to dot the beach.

In your head, you could practically visualise the beach populate over time.

I thought that was really interesting to think about.

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I am heading back.

I am walking back through a cobblestoned walkway in Odjo D’Agua hotel.

The Odjo D’Agua guy and his “date” have left the table.

The hotel owner guy left his food practically untouched.

I need to get back to the—

—-

WAAAAAIIIITTTTTTTT

The hotel owner guy left his food practically untouched.

There is Food on that table. Food- There is Food on that table. Practically untouched Food.

What is going to be done with the Food???

Yeh! What is going to happen to the food??!!

In this very moment, my body ceases to be my own. My legs begin to march around the palm trees and decorative plants, towards the hotel dining area.

What Rubbish.

Because he owns a 4-star hotel he thinks he can waste food however he wants.

What Nonsense.

I find myself seated at the table. My backpack is on the ground, resting against one of the table legs.

The rice in the plate ahead of me begins to rapidly disappear.

As I sit there, munching and fuming, face practically buried in the plate of rice, I vaguely perceive a uniformed being hovering over me.

I am completely incapable of processing what is happening. All of the currently ensuing events are far outside the circumference of my shrunken consciousness.

My sole concern in life right now, is effectively seeing to the plate of rice before me.

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I am about to finish the rice. Hunger somewhat assuaged, my sense of environmental-awareness gradually begins to expand to its usual extent.

Now I have the cognitive resources to process the visual signals I was receiving earlier.

The hovering uniformed being was a waiter at the hotel.

The waiter carted away the bowl of chicken on the table.

Ah that’s true, there was chicken.

A pang of grief stings me. I find myself grieving the departed chicken.

Why did the waiter take the bowl of chicken away? Couldn’t they see I had plans for it?

I finish up with the rice.

At some point my ears begin to function, and I can hear the ocean waves crashing against the beach a number of metres to my left.

I couldn’t hear all of that before.

I drink some water and prepare to leave, fuming sub-vocally at the overzealous waiter.

I pick up my backpack and sling it across my shoulder, as I find my way out of the hotel dining area.

Today has not been such a bad day.

Not so bad. Not so bad at all.

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Image: Random day at the Santa Maria Pier, with the Odjo D’Agua Hotel in the background.