Top Ten Things I Miss About Africa

1) Dry heat. None of this humid, oppress-you-like-a-moist-quilt atmosphere.

2) Filetted steak. If I ask for "lumps of meat in sauce" around here they look at me like I've just asked them to smell purple.

3) Violent weather. Around here is rains almost apologetically, cringing down to earth in careful clouds of dampness that last for hours. I want wind, dangit! I want to see the stormfront building up in the atmosphere for at least twenty minutes before it rains, driving the air in front of it and setting everyone's hair on edge with accumulating electricity. I want to jump when I hear the thunder and finch when cold, hard raindrops hit me.

4) Lizards. Squirrels just don't have the same presence. They look too smart and you can't spend a good fifteen minutes gleefully chasing them. Well, you can, but it's not worth it. Anyway, there were more lizards than squirrels.

5) Miles of nothing. I can't go anywhere around here where there won't be a building for at least a few kilometers. I want a place where there is a slight chance that if I get disoriented while walking I won't stumble onto a road in five minutes of frantic thrashing around.

6) Snakes and/or scorpions. I may not like being bitten or stung by them, but they added a certain zest to life. You never knew if you might walk around a corner and come ankle-to-face with a cobra, or lift up a rock and find a fat brown scorpion gesturing rudely at you.

7) General rules of social conduct. To my horror, I used my left hand to take my ID card back from the lunch lady the other day. I didn't eat dessert in self-punishment. Also, expletives in Africa were generally reserved for extreme circumstances, at least in mixed company. The word suggesting extreme sexual acts was not considered an all-encompassing adjective.

8) My tan. I'm getting all pasty and pale in this atmosphere. In Africa you started crisping after about fourteen minutes in the sun.

9) The basic assumptions of common sense. In Africa if you spilled coffee on yourself in a restaurant, you apologized for messing up the floor and you didn't file a lawsuit based on some mild first-degree burns. Things like hair-dryers were not covered with labels warning against use in the orifices (I think. Some labels were in Arabic).

10) My motorcycle. I didn't need a license to drive it, it was all-terrain, and it was my precious.