London

The first time I visited the UK, I recalled the story of a Nigerian boy who upon setting his eyes upon the city of London for the first time, asked innocently, " Na the London be dis? Why dem no paint am? "

The first thing I noticed on the ride from the airport to my hostess' home, was the old buildings, some dating as far back as 2,000 years. Some of them looked old enough to topple over. The second was the fact that we were driving on the wrong side of the road. The third was the smell. London smelled of tea and stale cigarettes.

The first dish I sampled was an apple pie simply because I had had enough of salivating each time it was mentioned in a novel. It did not taste so bad, at least it was a better experience than the first time I had strawberries. As long as I could remember, I had always been fascinated by this fruit with such a vibrant shade of red, surely its taste would be heavenly, sweeter than honey I presumed. When I did finally have it I almost wept in utter disappointment. It wasn`t even sugary! 

The weather, even in summer was unpredictable, scorching sun one minute, large rain droplets the next, as if she decides to be summer in the morning and spring in the afternoon. I quickly got used to holding a jacket just in case. 

The underground rail system or the Tube was what impressed me most. Having the privilege of being the World`s first underground railway and dating as far back as 1863 when the first train was commissioned, the Tube boasts of 408 kilometres of track of which 55% of it is above ground. The shallowest depth below ground is 17 feet while the deepest is 221 feet. The network covers Greater London as well as some smaller regional towns and conveys an astonishing average of 2.7 million passengers daily. 

On a typical day, a journey from Abbey Wood to Paddington, for instance, would cost about 11 Pounds, same journey by taxi could cost six times as much. Even though I fought back a claustrophobic feeling of being buried each time the train went underground. For me, this is no doubt the solution to the maddening traffic in Lagos.

A friend told me a story. One cold rainy morning as she commuted to work, the train she was in stopped all of a sudden and as the passengers craned their necks to peer outside the window, the driver announced that there had been a 'jumper' and that the tracks would have to be cleared before they could continue on their journey. I shivered involuntarily as an image of a man or a woman taking a leap of death in front of a train moving at 60mph, began to materialize in my head. I was stunned to discover that in the UK, jumping under a train accounts for around 3.5% of all suicides. Shuo!

I enjoyed riding in the red double-decker buses that looked almost too large for the narrow roads. I held my breath in fear each time they took a turn that brought them within inches of the cars on the opposite lane. One of my favourite pastimes was crowd watching and I enjoyed doing this on these rides. A tall teenage boy and a pink-haired girl explored each other`s mouths with their tongues, a young man in an Arsenal t-shirt spoke loudly in yoruba on his mobile phone, a freckled girl who looked no older than 15 years slowly rocked a sleeping baby in a stroller, a white old lady with rheumy, exhausted eyes stared at me suspiciously.

On a warm Friday night, some friends took me to a naija night club in East London which was no different from its counterparts in Lagos except that smoking in enclosed places like this had since been banned. Music blared from invincible speakers, scantily-clad girls in sky-high heels that they struggled to walk in swayed into the club, young men with roving eyes leaned against the huge bar which stood at the centre, three hefty bouncers tried to break up a fight between a group of girls. I quickly lost interest in their fake-Brazilian-hair-pulling cat fight as Ghanaian musician, Sarkodie`s hit song "you know say money no be problem" started and I hit the dance floor. I thought nothing could spoil my groove until they stopped selling alcohol at 2.00 am. Haba! When I was just warming up? Shortly after this the crowd began to thin out. I was disappointed but in retrospect, it was a brilliant idea to stop the sale of alcohol early enough in order to at least control, howbeit a little, the issue of drunk driving.

A day before my holiday ended and I returned to Lagos, we heard on the news that the police had discovered the body of a teenage boy in a field. They believed that the boy who had been missing for days may have been strangled, and this happened to be the second case in about three months. They warned that there might be a serial killer on the loose. Serial killer ke? I slept with one eye open that night and anxiously waited for dawn so I could head to the airport and then to the safety of my home in Lagos. I no fit shout.