Super

Well I won't forget that one anytime soon. The party last week was supposed to be in lieu of any actual celebrating on my birthday. It was a lot of fun, Catherine made great food and an awesome cake (that's me taking a bite out it), and there was a good number of us there. So I definitely wasn't expecting to spend my real birthday watching the Super Bowl live at 3 in the morning in a club in Bamenda.

Some of us decided we would get together and try to stream the game online, but once we were here we decided to hunt down a better option. There's an upscale restaurant in town that told us they got ESPN on satellite so after confirming that ESPN had the international rights to the game we managed to get some more people to come in to town, ten of us in total, and started the long process of trying to stay up till the game started fueled by grilled fish and beer. Gabe managed to line up a cabbie who would take us to the restaurant and then pick us up later which was huge because the actual city is completely dead late at night. So at about midnight we pile in the cab and make for the restaurant. Well, turned out the ESPN was really ESPN Classic and we were sure we had just blown it, but they turned us on to a club down the street, so Gabe and I went to scout it out just in time to catch the coin toss. It was a surreal thing to be watching that game here on a big plasma screen and to interact with Cameroonians trying to figure out what in the world we were watching and why we were so excited. I'd never be this determined to watch a Super Bowl between the Saints and Colts in the states, but you tend to latch on to anything American here. I mean I have a Beyonce poster in my house for God's sake.

Looking back I'm actually surprised we made as long as we did, through the 3rd quarter, without any power failures, but then the whole building cut out. We're still not really sure what happened, since the rest of the street was still lit. Either the place was on a timer or the guy baby sitting us, since were were there long after closing time and everyone else had long left, decided it was past his bedtime and took some initiative. We were able to get home in time, about 4am, to catch the very end online but we missed all the action in the 4th and sadly I never got to see Manning embarrass himself. Still it's always a good night when the Colts lose, right Ash? ;) Needless to say I'm a little exhausted right now so I'm going to wrap this up. We're all still hanging out in the case waiting on the Medical staff to get here from Yaounde with the now mandatory swine flu vaccines. With no reported cases of the virus in Cameroon I'm not sure what the point is, but I've gotten something like 12 shots already, what's one more?