Nigerian Chop (that's food for those of you not yet up on the local lingo)

Snail. They actually look like this, but cooked. And without the shell.

On our third day, the school took us our to ‘Yellow Chilli’ for our first taste of African food. While the goat head soup, and offal pepper soup looked really appealing, we went a bit more tame…. With fish pepper soup for me and goat pepper soup. One thing I’ve noticed is that Africans like soup. Most of the time, soup is actually more like a stew. And it’s very peppery! Spicy! MMMMM.  Also on the menu was goat legs… not actually goat legs, but the tendons and vessels. Didn’t try that either. Did try the snails though. Big fat juicy snails… despite being quite tough and tasting like soils, they tasted a lot like paua. Mmmm.

Akara. YUM!

We’ve discovered a few tasty treats from the street vendors:  akara – which are deep fried bean balls are probably my favourite. My first experience with batering for these, went a little something like this: “How much?” “10 naira” (that’s the equivalent of 10 nz cents)…. “I’ll give you 20 naira for 3”… to which the lady chuckled to herself and accepted the offer…. 2 minutes later we reach into the bag, to find there are 4 akara in there…. Obviously she felt sorry for my terrible haggling skills and wanted to let me know the correct price. Although, it’s kind of hard to haggle over 10 cents. 10 cents! Come on, that’s already a bargain!!

Efo soup. Those curly bits are skin. I gave those to Caleb.

 We've also tried cooking some efo soup (so it was a frozen soup from the supermarket... don't judge us) along with some pounded yam flour. You mix this yam flour with boiling water and it turns into a playdough like subtance, which you then rip off and dip in your soup. Efo soup consists of large quantities of 'greens' (unsure exactly what kind), pepper and hunks of meat. It's really strong in flavour, but looks quite unappealing....

Another amazing discovery are the incredible 50cent loaves of bread from the street vendors. These have saved us a couple of times when stuck in a go-slow with no food.  

The Nigerians that we work with are often in disbelief when we tell them what we have been trying. I think they expect us to come here and long for the food and comfort of our home country.  But then, why would we come here in the first place? If we wanted rice without stony grit in it, then we would have stayed home.