minjibir

 we went on a little trip yesterday to a nearby village called minjibir. it's a small fishing village about 30 km away from kano. while driving out there it hit me how incredibly different it is to live here in nigeria compared to europe. the nigerians in the north are very friendly people. while driving around town i've noticed that when i catch eye contact with most people they tend to smile and wave. in an awkward way you know that every time you go to the market to buy something everyone is going to try to rip you off using a wide spectrum of devious tricks yet at that same market with the same people you can bet that if you pay a guy twice by mistake ( yes it does happen cause you're usually bargaining with a few people at the same time and everyone is trying to shout over everyone else),  he will actually give you the money back, or when my mom once forgot to take the shopping she made ( a few good bags of meat) the shop keepers helper came over to the house in the afternoon with the bags even though we would have never been able to find the shop we bought the food in (how the helper knew where we live is a mystery) anyway going back to the trip. As we were driving out there we passed villagers on the side of the road who were excited when they saw a car filled with white people drive by. They would smile and wave and be polite when they saw a head turn their way. Sometime near the end of the trip we got to the lake were the village fished we decided to drive over the old dam. The road looked like it wasn’t used in a while. In the middle we met a few fishermen who we asked whether the road was passable. We soon found out it wasn’t, bought a basket full of fresh fish and took a million of pictures. They were very open and didn’t let us go for an hour. Chatting, joking and making small talk.  
For dinner we had tilapia ( the small fish we bought). We fried them and because they were so small we ate them together with most of the skeleton ( excluding the head {we did remove the insides first thought}). Once well fried the tail becomes crispy as does most of the fish.