Grace got me gift certificate to my favorite store, Stanford's, for my birthday, and I used the money to buy two gigantic wall calendars, one of which is all about Africa. And then, on Saturday, Grace and I took a long walk down to the Tate Modern, where there is this new exhibit called La Maison Tropical.
It's a flatpack house designed by some great architect in the 1950s. It was made out of materials durable enough to withstand the harsh climate and humidity of African rain forest. Basically it was supposed to be stylish, cheap, housing for rich people in Africa. They could never get it cheap enough though, so they only ever made three. This is one of them. Some architecture buff went down to the Republic of Congo and brought it back to England to display (apparently he had to clean it up quite a bit - there were bullet holes in the walls from the Congo's civil war). Anyway we went down to see it. I thought it would be free to go inside, but it was £5, and we didn't think that was worth it.
But the most worrying development of all came very early Saturday morning. It must have been three or four in the morning and we were fast asleep. Suddenly this horrible, awful noise screamed out - it was probably a fire alarm going off in our flat. Since our place is so small, that fire alarm was really, really, really, really loud.
In a blind panic I sat bolt upright in bed. And you know what thought went through my head?
"Republic of Congo! Gabon!"
I think I was worried I had screwed something up at work or something.
The fire alarm stopped as quickly as it started, and then we went back to bed. But it happened again later that night, and once again, in my panic, I thought "Republic of Congo!"
No comments:
Post a Comment