In the Soup

Posting this pic from this weekend’s trip to Souter Lighthouse seems like a good excuse to tell you about my “Soup” page.  Check it out here.

In short, using the magic of RSS feeds, it takes all the content from my blogs (ie this one and the new Cameroon one) and my Flickring, Twittering, Last FM-ing and Deliciousing and streams it all on to one page.

Right now, well, there’s probably not that much to see, but once we hit a full on Cameroonian assault hopefully there’ll be quite a flood detailing my African adventures (and it’s soundtrack).

In the meantime I’ve been, as you might imagine, searching by all means necessary to find out more info on Bamenda, my new Cameroonian home.  So far so good.  Lots of people seem to like it and if there’s no real expat community to speak of there do seem to be plenty of other volunteers around.  No doubt there will be some beer buddies amongst them.

I dropped a message to say hi to zzilch (Peace Corps, I think) who posted this photo complete with info stating:

After spending two days at our post, we travelled Friday morning to Bamenda, the capital of the Northwest Province. Since our post wasn’t far from the training village and we still had 3 days left of site visit, we took the opportunity to visit other volunteers in the area.

Bamenda is a great city, with a large market and even a supermarket that has things like corn flakes! Since the Northwest is one of the two Anglophone provinces, we had to shift gears and go from speaking nothing but French in the West to speaking English and even a few words of Pidgin (which I’m learning) in Bamenda and the surrounding villages we visited.

We stayed with a volunteer who is posted near Bamenda, and his friend took us and two other trainees to ride horseson Saturday morning. The view from the summit of a hill we climbed on horseback was so beautiful, it was almost worth the five full days of beaucoup de pain all of us had as a result of the three hour ride.

We made some great friends, both Cameroonian and American during our trip that we’re looking forward to seeing again when training is complete.

On Sunday, the five of us who met up in Bamenda headed back to training on a bus that was surprisingly uncrowded for the first few hours of the trip. Then we changed buses. The last hour on the bus was cramped, bumpy, and polluted as a Cameroonian bus ride should be.

As ever I appear to have entirely lucked out in being assigned the most beautiful place to live in. I always was a lucky f**cker.