The city never really changed with the oncoming seasons. It was hot all year round, but in June heavy rains came down to whip the dry heat into a warm mist. The ill-informed western traveler would expect either one of two extremes: the safari grassland filled with zebras, giraffes and lions or the bounteous jungle filled with monkeys, lizards and lions that have been wrongly named “King of the Jungle”. It wasn’t either one. It was a city born from twisted metal and plastic leftovers that the developed world had left behind after squeezing every drop of the land’s black blood. Between every mud colored office building or rare shining, silver skyscraper was humble shanties that enticed the people with its collections of warm soups, counterfeit electronics and stiff brightly colored cloth that sparkled in the clouds of dust and smoke from depilated SUVs, struggling against the permanent grid lock of the stagnant brown gravel wide road that stretched for miles. The honks and beeps competed with the pound of African drums blaring from nearby boom boxes and deep voices of merchants navigating the cramped street way to sell their bootleg goods. At the heart of the city, an impoverished dark faced men sporting their dust caked Old Navy shirts danced vigorously to drum beat for the few Naira that dropped out of the suit jacket sleeve of a young clean shaven man waiting to catch a ride on from the oncoming motorcycle. A young woman straightened various cloths of blue, pink, purple, red and green cloth over a wide wooden table next to a dusty store front. If the wind blew the right way, the delicious spice of vegetable curry stew would cover the smog of the road way. Along the Gulf of Guinea sits the port city of Lagos, Nigeria.
