Long shirts and short skirts

I said I wanted to go there. He laughed. I repeated that it was there that I wanted to go. The driver laughed again, but this time not hiding a trace of fear that I was really serious about it. "It's already 10 am, so we'd better start going, right?", I asked trying to put a sad end to his doubts. Already accepting the idea, he just advised me that the Ojunwoye market was a messy place.

Messy? The most complicated of all the labyrinths is a child's game compared to such a place: now I can say that pure anarchy in not an utopia and it does exist on Earth. It exists in Lagos, Nigeria! I'm talking about an endless circulating path strangled by big shops, little stalls, fast selling carts, wooden shelters and cement stained constructions; infested by dust, dirt, stinking odours and terrible mosquitoes; crushed by striking heat and breathtaking humidity; crossed by stagnated highly polluted canals and involved in contaminated rubbish.

A market that has everything one can imagine. We walked in through the detergents area: for the floor, the dishes, the windows, but also the car if you have one, if you don't have, search for one further ahead, and also for your toilet, in case you don't use the beach, that is much cheaper than building a WC, and then you save money for the Johnny Walker Blue Label just right after, or the Chivas 20 years, the William Lawson's, the Port, the gin, vodka or tequila, the Martini, on the rocks is a possibility, because ice is also available, not white anymore, but for white we already have the t-shirts, sweat-shirts, long shirts, short skirts, jeans and jackets, hats and caps. Let's not forget the CDs, DVDs, boredom remedies and other goodies, engine parts, broken equipment for fools and other mechanical tools, from the more complex to the simplest, like that big dirty knife used to cut the raw meat disposed on the dusty floor, but to cut also the fish, the vegetables, the fruit and other hardly called food. When I saw living chickens in cages, I got immediately out of there and got back to the cosiness of the factory.

In the end, I bought a bottle of water, a cutting hair machine, a British old style hat and a Nigerian suit!