Oh Africa!

I have been settling down in the capital city since I arrived this past Friday. We are staying here until Wednesday when we make the 10 hour ride to our city. My team has been so gracious and they have shown me how to taxi, get around in the market, purchase enough meat and cheese to freeze for a lifetime, and how to go fabric shopping. Of course, being a textile major, fabric shopping was the most exciting. However the print patterns were nowhere near the types of things we designed at N.C. State. Apparently we are behind on our design skills and oversized motifs! After the 3rd fabric store I started making a list of all the crazy images on these fabrics. I hope some of these make you laugh and I wish I had pictures of all of these. There were fabrics with…

• bowling alleys, psychedelic chicken legs, teapots and coffee cups, shrimp, the seashore, Alka-Seltzer tablets dissolving in a cup of water (I was really tempted to buy this one!), a keyboard with musical notes coming from it, a large scale picture of a boat similar to Titanic, a green sofa with hearts and palm trees around it, tree stumps, lips and lipstick, belts, Saturn, and finally a fishing net with fish.

My African cloth  :)



Because I wanted my first fabric to be a fun fabric, I ended up purchasing the fish fabric. A part of me still really wants the Alka-Seltzer print. I felt accomplished buying my first African cloth. When we get to our city we will have the fabrics tailored.


Among the other things that make me laugh in Africa, one of them is the packaging of peanuts. I pride them on being resourceful and recyclable in the way they do this. All of the peanuts that you buy in the grocery store and markets come in gin bottles. My supervisor did reassure me that all the alcohol bottles that she has stored up in her house were from peanuts and not anything else. Oh how things are much different here! Once we get to our city I hope to post pictures up of the house!

Recycling in Africa