Akin Oladimeji

Akins' blog, of which this is merely the first entry, will be fully entered soon. It's an account of his travels from March to May 2007, and is shot through with intellectual exuberance, visceral colour, and great fun. More than that, it shows why at 23 one of his short stories was chosen for inclusion in a Penguin short story anthology. He later studied a poetry M. A. at the University of East Anglia under Andrew Motion. His take on this period of his life is by turns wryly compassionate and revealing.

Akin's Travel Blog, March 2007.

Slowly. You have to walk slowly through this city or you’ll sweat, sweat like a stuck pig in a trap under the blazing eye of the sun.
Weird. It’s weird walking up the cobbled streets in flip-flops. Wearing things I only ever wear indoors in other countries is strange, almost as strange as going to a non-swingers bar and touching up a girl while her man watches. Yellow with green straps and with a logo of the national flag on them, my Havaianas reflect the country perfectly: rubbery and resilient, pretty yet gritty.

There are street urchins here. Boys walking singly in threadbare shirts and sweat-soaked, smelly shirts, stealing and begging and hustling at all hours. Painters and prostitutes ply their practises on Pelourinho’s pavements. The artists paint or sell their kitsch work under the gaze of the sun in the center of the city while the tarts are also brightly attired, go up to the gringos, say those words comprehensible to anyone with the most basic grasp of English: You want the fuckyfucky?

From my bedroom I can see the sea. The big windows with Portuguese architecture are a screen for the city’s spectacles, which I view everyday. The beggars sleeping on the streets, tourists walking up the hill sunglasses on and cameras around their necks, shopkeepers watching the tourists and ready with a smile, ready to sell at ten times the cost price to them, the policemen, berets on their heads and guns strapped to their hips, the too-thin man that walks around sometimes barefoot, sometimes with nothing but a t-shirt on. Then there’s the buildings created with Portuguese architecture and imbued with a rough beauty, a faded grandeur, they still stand tall with a broken glamour. And then the sea.