Poker in Port Harcourt

Poor old Port Harcourt does not have the best reputation as a fun and vibrant city, and poor old us for being semi-stranded there for the day on New Year's Eve. We arrived the night before after rattling along 10 hours from Lagos with Cross Country bus line. Their logo looks just like the London underground, but my bones told me that this journey was most definitely over ground! So did my eyes as I watched the lush squigdyness of the Niger Delta pass by.

Anyhoo, we spent the day anxiously waiting for our fellow VSO chums to hotfoot it over from Cameroon, and desperately hoping we weren't going to have a New Year for five in Port Harcourt. With very little to do we entertained ourselves with a supermarket tour. A trip to Park 'n' Shop (Nigeria's most poshest supermarket, aka Park 'n' Rob by skint VSOs) was wildly exciting - mmm cheese, mmmmm nice bread... I'll have that, and that and that andthatnthatnthatnthatn...... Back in our hotel we happily munched and crunched through our feast, oggling MTV and enjoying a/c until NEPA 'took the light'.

Time for poker we thought, so we moved to the rooftop terrace for our first lesson. While the view was very..... um, something (concrete flyovers, tattered bill boards, hotchpotch shambled market, pot-holed p*ss smelling motor parks) it was just too hot, and the air sat on us damp and heavy.

Inside the bar the lesson commenced and soon bets were ever increasingly ferocious (but not me - far too conservative!). Our audience (there is ALWAYS an audience in Nigeria) were keenly eyeing our $50 & $100 bills that we were waving around until I equally keenly assured them they were fakes. Port Harcourt probably not the best place for a group of white people to be waving around convincing looking dollar bills.

(There is a lizard looking at me from my doorway as I write this - maybe it wants to come in and learn about HIV? I'll ask it...) Um, I digress, maybe because this isn't so interesting after all?
I was rubbish at poker too.
Boo.