Comedy TV shows with a God theme

August 5, 2019

Do you remember when undercover cop stories were all the rage? What am I saying, there is like one new cop show every frigging week. Recently, I noticed that God stories were all the rage. It started with The Good Place, about four people that die and make it into heaven, except that heaven is not anything like they thought it would be and some of them were pretty horrible on earth. It has evolved as a show from season to season and will end after the next season (Season 4). Last year, another show started God Friended Me about an atheist who gets friended by God on facebook and sent friend requests of people he is supposed to help- honestly made me think why a person called “millennial prophet” would pay that much attention to facebook instead of say instagram? But then again, thia is a show about God sending people to do his work through facebook sooo

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Most recently, Miracle Workers debuted its pilot about Heaven Inc going bust because God is having a mid-life crisis triggered by people not liking him enough anymore. He enters into a bet with an employee that if she can answer the prayer of two (geeks obviously) to fall in love in two weeks, Heaven Inc can stay in operation. It has been renewed for Season 2.

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Are these shows great? Not really. Do I watch all of them? Obviously. You kind of just have to take them for what they are and enjoy it.

A Beginner's Guide to Intermittent Fasting

August 3, 2019

Intermittent fasting has been around for ages. I first heard of it in 2013 when a girl in my office started shedding pounds like crazy and said it was a mixture of the 5:2 diet and a Jillian Michaels workout plan. For a long time, the 5:2 diet was popular. Here’s how it works. You eat “normally” for five days of the week and on two days, you eat 500 calories. I tried it and got depressed by trying to eat 500 calories. I quit after day 1.

Intermittent fasting is alternating periods of fasting with periods of eating (something we almost all do). As a diet plan, fasting is regarded as a period of 12 hours and more. Intermittent fasting works for weight loss in two main ways; helping you eat less overall by restricting your eating to specific times and giving your body room to perform its digestive functions properly.

To get started, study your current habits and pick an eating window that works with your lifestyle. When I’ve suggested to people that they should start with twelve hours, the overwhelming response is “I already do that”. Chances are, you probably don’t. And if you do, might as well record it for a week and then work from there. I’ve written before about setting yourself up to succeed rather than fail. People always think their habits are already great, but that their life or body conspires against them. Trust me, I’ve often felt that but tracking stuff shows you the true picture. For example, if I didn’t start tracking my reading, I would have sworn I was reading 100 books a year- turns out, without deliberate effort to that, I wasn’t.

How much calories are really in your meals? Take a look at this weeks clip of Secret Eaters. Subscribe! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT8J9wOAksalRA96uw4oKsg?sub_confirmation=1 Secret Eaters is a British documentary television series about overeating.

Say you wake up at 5 everyday and have a long commute and get to the office at 7. It might make sense to make your eating window 7am- 7pm so you don’t get to work and start feeling depressed because you can’t eat. If you wake up later and tend to have drinks and dinners, or go to bed really late, maybe your eating window becomes 10am-10pm. Until you track your habits, you’d be surprised that while you don’t eat a full meal till 12, you’ve tasted forks of your colleagues breakfast or had a mindless snack or had Nigerian tea aka tea with a 5:1 ratio of milk and sugar to tea.

If you’re a woman that’s fasting, you have to be a little more aware of how your body responds to fasting and longer fasting periods may de-regulate your hormones. The recommended longest fasting window for women is 14:10 but it depends on your own personal experience. So as you gradually increase your fasting windows, keep track of how you’re feeling.

People argue that your fasting window has to be the same everyday. I disagree. While it’s good to have a routine (your body craves and thrives on routine), I think it’s important to build flexibility into any long term plan. If you’re in bed by 10 on weekdays but you’re out all night on weekends, you might change to a 12:12 window. I use the app zero to track fasting windows whenever I fast.

Intermittent fasting, like anything else may or may not be suited to you, no matter what all the biohacking posts on medium say. If you’ve tried it, how did you find it?

How to plan a holiday to 6 countries in 3 weeks with your Nigerian passport

August 1, 2019

In May, I went on a multi country holiday. I went with my husband, because it was our honeymoon. Lol. We went to 6 countries and 7 cities in 3 weeks (Dubai, London, Rome, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Paris and Birmingham.) We got asked two questions again and again when we were on the trip:

how much was it?
what agent did you use?

There’s no point telling you how much the trip was because I feel like holiday budgets depend on so many factors that can affect the price in a million ways; where you go, when you go, the airlines or train companies you use, what class you fly, the hotels you stay in and the activities you choose to do on holiday. This post addresses the second question because we planned and booked the entire trip ourselves.

Because my husband and I had both been to Dubai before, we both knew exactly where we wanted to stay. He hadn’t done all the touristy stuff, so we decided to book tours and etc through Emirates holidays. Emirates Holidays ended up booking our tours and airport transfers and we paid for our hotel through them (they had a discount). If you are concerned about the quality of your tours and transfers, It is best to book yourself.

We booked everything else ourselves. We sat in a room on our laptops for 9 hours and booked flights, hotels, trains, tours and other transport. 7 flights, three trains, 5 hotels and 1 air bnb. We also applied for our visas ourselves.

Visas

I will go into a more detailed visa post when I review each country, but you should always check for up to date information on the official visa page of the country you’re travelling to. Visa regulations and requirements change so quickly, you may be bound by completely different rules when you’re applying for the same visa as someone else, 1 month apart.

Hotels

The biggest consideration for hotels is what kind of trip you want to have. Do you plan to go out during the day, or more at night or both? What attractions do you absolutely HAVE To see. When you have that information, you have a starting point. If you want to go out mostly at night, obviously you want to be in a super bustling area that's safe to be around at night. If you're mostly going out during the day, then your tour attractions would be more important.

In Dubai, we wanted to stay on the JBR walk because we wanted to wake up and walk two minutes to the beach. Tour companies pick you up from your hotel, so it wasn't important to consider tours in hotel choice, plus the desert tour is far from everything anyway. It was Ramadan so we wanted to be somewhere that would come alive after lftar, as the city is very subdued in the daytime during Ramadan. 5 star hotels are also cheaper in Dubai than Europe, so it was worth staying in one just because.

We went to London twice. On the first trip, it was one night only and I needed to see my cousin, so we booked a hotel 1 mile or two tube stops away from her house.

In Rome, we booked a hotel that was walking distance to three of the main tourist attractions. I'm talking 6 minute walk to the trevi fountain. The hotel was meh but the location was excellent and there was a great restaurant downstairs. There is food everywhere in Rome so that wasn't a booking consideration.

In Amsterdam, we couldn't decide so we booked two different hotels (I wouldn't recommend this for a short trip, it was more annoying than we anticipated) We stayed like a few 100 metres from Anne Frank Huis the first time and stayed practically in the red light district the second night. The second hotel was also super close to the train station we were leaving from.

Paris was really confusing for us in terms of area and we just went for something close to Gare du Nord where we were leaving from. In the end, it was alright. We ended up taking the metro a few times and we were able to walk 20 minutes to the Louvre.

Our second trip in London, we wanted to be central but in a quiet area, so we chose Marylebone. Because it was the longest part of our trip we went for an Airbnb rather than a hotel.

Some more tips for accommodation:

If you try to weigh the value of accommodation by thinking 'I can buy this with that money', you're going to end up staying in shit places, because good accommodation is hardly ever cheap.
Many countries will 90% of the time, have a tourism tax which they never include in the cost of the hotel (or even highlight when you’re booking). It's never expensive but an unexpected cost is an unexpected expense.
Always pack toothpaste, a toothbrush and lotion. Every hotel will give you soap and towels but even 5 star hotels won’t always give you toothpaste unless you request it. Don't take the risk. Hotel lotion is NEVER moisturising enough, so avoid ashy skin and pack your own.
Don't be obsessed with picking a perfect place. You're bound to make some mistakes
Do research, even if it's googling 'best areas for tourists Paris 2019'
Use booking.com
if you stay in an Airbnb, take a video of the place as soon as your arrive and everyday you’re there, to serve as evidence, if the host tries to blame you for breaking something.
Always always always pack a mini first aid kit with things like paracetamol (paracetamol is a safe painkiller to travel with) and Andrews liver salts because trust me, it’s not fun to walk around with luggage and cramps trying to find an open pharmacy at 7am or to not have anything to stop you from throwing up a million times if you get food poisoning (or are hungover)

Travel.

The best way to figure out how to plan your trip is studying a map. If you have no map skills, you have to do a lot of googling and base it on price and ease of access between cities. We did not plan the trip in the most geographically sensible way, we had our own special (and random) set of considerations. Once you decide all the places you want to go, picking how you go from city to city isn’t really that difficult. We did a mixture of trains and planes because trains were our preferred travel choice but it wasn’t always practical (too long or too expensive)
Short haul low cost airlines like easyjet are not always as bad as you've heard. Pay for extra legroom if you can-sometimes it gives you priority boarding and sometimes, a little extra luggage allowance. Always check in online when you use them (for most of them, you can check in up to a month in advance) and get to the airport early because security queues can be very crazy. We had to pay for priority access in one airport because the queue was insane.
Confirm from the the transport service provider what your ticket includes. We booked 1st class tickets on a six hour train from Amsterdam to Germany, assuming it would include food and wifi. The tickets did not include food and the train did not have wifi. They didn’t accept debit cards as payment for their food cart. Luckily, I always carry a bottle of water and a snack when I’m travelling and i’m Nigerian and therefore used to not having wifi, so it was fine (but shocking).

Experiences.

Try Airbnb experiences. There are all sorts of things there that you wouldn’t normally know to look for in a new city.
Book a local photographer to follow you around and take your photo at popular tourist spots. This is really useful if you’re a solo traveller or a couple that wants photos that aren’t awkward selfies. There are a lot of photographers on Airbnb experiences and honestly, it’s not even that expensive. They can also serve as tour guides.
Research and make a list of things you would like to see and honestly it’s okay if some of the most popular things don’t even appeal to you.
Be flexible- the weather might be different to what you expected and invalidate 3/4 of your wardrobe, you might get food poisoning, the hotel might be shit when you get there. You need to be flexible or you won’t be able to find the joy when things go wrong.
Allow yourself downtime and just time to wander around- honestly, travelling is exhausting and it can often feel like you need to maximise your trip money by not doing something every minute of everyday. I like to think the hotel money is a waste if I don’t get in a few naps.
Always check before you make assumptions- i’ve repeated this so many times because we did this a lot. Sometimes, you can just call the hotel and ask for a hotel pick up- which is probably cheaper and safer than a lot of options especially when you don’t know the place. Ask, ask and ask again.
If there's a grocery store near you, use it first before anything else, so you can prioritise your food money on food experiences (like nice restaurants). In Paris, we ate the hotel breakfast the first day (not worth it) and then realised there was a grocery store close by where we could have bought breakfast at for a tiny fraction of the breakfast price.
Download a translation app that you can use offline especially in places like Paris where locals will pretend to not understand you. Also download offline maps and save local emergency numbers.

This post can go on forever, I’ve tried to keep it short. I will be putting up travel guides or tips for each country throughout the month. Comment or message me with any questions (apart from how much the trip cost) and I’d be happy to answer!

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How to prep for a day on the couch

July 19, 2019

There are some days that are for productivity and some days that are for the couch. I’m going to give you my best tips to make your next couch day the best one yet!

Pick a good couch- if you have only one couch, then I guess it’s a no brainer, but if you have more than one, pick one that gives you optimal lying and sitting space and that is positioned in front of the tv.
Clear said couch- you want to start with a completely clear couch so you have enough space for everything.
Prep your snacks- pick things that keep your hands relatively clean, couch days aren’t really for barbecue chicken wings.
Prep your drinks bottles- you need a bottle of water- and then a flat drink (yes wine counts, preferably red), something that won’t taste weird after sitting out of the fridge for some time. If you want something fizzy, bring it out last and drink it first.
Create space for your gadgets near a charging source- if there’s no space on the couch, use a small side table or the floor. You need your devices and chargers within arms (or legs) reach.
Plan your couch entertainment- couch days are perfect for bingeing tv shows, reading light books or scrolling mindlessly on social media. If you’re me, do it all.
Make sure everything has a space that isn’t on top of you- you need a clear and quick path to get to the bathroom when you inevitably need to go.
Err on the side of a cold room and keep a blanket close for when you get too cold and start to fall asleep.
Wake up with the credits of a bad movie playing and popcorn crumbs on your laptop and figure out how to get yourself to bed.

Is circa privé your new favorite lekki restaurant?

June 30, 2019

I’m really excited everytime something new opens in Lekki. Before I moved to Lekki, I hated going there, but now that I live there, I hate leaving! Everything good lives in V.I and sometimes the thought of going to V.I makes me sit my ass home and not do anything. So imagine my excitement when a huge ass building housing a new restaurant/bar/ a lot happening opened right on Admiralty Way. I was even more excited when they emailed me to attend an “exclusive” chefs dinner to try the menu, because I balk at spending money at new Lagos places.

With an empty stomach and green lipstick, I went to try the new menu.

There were 10 of us invited, one person didn’t show up. I was the first one there (as always, I keep hoping that if I keep showing up to things on time, something will eventually start on time). Another blogger showed up like half an hour later, it took like two hours for other people to show up, it was actually really really really annoying.

DRINKS

There was no drinks menu when we went, so we just ordered blind, I ordered based on how pretty the drinks looked. All the drinks were really good.

STARTERS

Mozzarella sticks- I loved the size, sometimes mozzarella sticks are big and overwhelming, this was a good size, tasted pretty good.

Calamari- tough and bland

Spring rolls- I’m still not sure what was inside but tasted really good, nice and crispy on the outside

Chicken wings- had a lot of potential, but not fully cooked, so wasn’t willing to risk it

Prawns- huge and tasty

SALADS

Seafood/fruit? salad- a likely confused by what kind of salad this was. It was very fresh. The octopus was tough and bland, I don’t know too much about how to cook octopus but this felt like it hopped from the sea into my plate via the shower.

Crab salad- fresh

Chicken salad- I wish it was made with something other than iceberg lettuce, considering all their salads are super expensive. Paired with spinach, rocket or an interesting mix, this would have been perfect. Unfortunately, the iceberg let this salad down.

MAINS

If there is one thing that’s sure, I always order salmon or duck as my main wherever available, so I went straight for the salmon main. It was absolutely delicious, so good, that I had a few forks and asked them to pack it up to give myself the chance to fully enjoy it when I wasn’t so full. I took photos of the other mains, but I didn’t try anything else and I didn’t ask anyone how their food tasted, but everyone seemed to enjoy their food.

DESSERT

By this time, we were really really really really full. The chef sent us shots and then the fondant came out. The shots were great, the fondant was dry, I wouldn’t even really call it a fondant, more like a dry cake. The dessert was maybe, the lowest point of the meal.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I would recommend this place off the strength of presentation alone. All the food was plated beautifully and the drinks looked great. The food was also really good, all the ingredients were obviously carefully chosen and fresh.

I looked at the menu a little bit and the food looked pretty pricey, so it’s more date night than '“lets grab a meal”.

The service wasn’t great. Considering this was a private event that Circa Privé personally invited us to, I was surprised. The service was great at upper levels (chef, management, PR), but not so good at the level that was important (waitstaff). However, they’ve hopefully sorted out all service issues by now.

Parking was valet parking which was expensive. Considering, we parked ourselves, it seems like “valet” was stretched A LOT.

why does the stew always finish

June 17, 2019

Growing up in a Nigerian home in Nigeria, stew was just a fact of life. You couldn’t trust that your parents would be there after they told you to “go and put on your shoes” but you could trust stew. Rice and stew, yam and stew , eba and stew (with a little ewedu flung in there).

As soon as I moved into my dead student accommodation, I switched to microwave meals, then cereal , then fast food and then finally, I started to cook. Pasta, lots and lots of pasta, then potatoes and when I was feeling very Nigerian and experimental, yam. Eventually, I added rice- fried and the occasional jollof, I even ventured into egusi. I made duck, roasted whole and pan fried. I made complicated Japanese meals that took days just to find all the speciality ingredients- I baked, I boiled, I sometimes fried, but I never made stew.

Marriage, changed that. Marriage didn’t change that because I was suddenly supposed to make stew, it changed that because now I was faced with a Nigerian kitchen and no help, if stew was to be magically in my freezer, I had to make it or convince my husband to make it. In our three year dating life, I gorged myself on bowls of his beautiful stew and declared it my favorite meal on earth. Now that we were married, I was no longer a visitor, it was my house too and therefore, it was time for me to contribute some stew.

I can’t remember my first stew, even though I made it literally months ago- I’ve made so much stew since then. I’ve experimented with all sorts of methods and oils and meats. The one thing though that always baffles me is...how does stew finish so fast?? One time, I decided to try and make enough stew for a week. I started with a chicken stock filled with what felt like a thousand pieces of chicken. I blended the pepper and tomatoes and onion and the whole thing came together in a glorious accomplishment of great stew that filled our largest pot. I was relived, I had achieved my great mission- to make a long lasting stew! Unfortunately, I pursued my mission on a day where my friend was visiting, she had seconds, my husband had thirds, I nursed my own plate, wondering how I ended up back here, with an almost empty pot of stew. It finished the next day.

Now, I realise something. Some mysteries are not meant to be solved, stew is meant to finish. No matter how much stew you start with, you will still need to make another stew in one or two working days (all days are working days for the making of stew).

I’m back, I think.

March 22, 2019

Hello hello hello to my one remaining follower. Shout out to you. Shout out to me for continuing to pay my very expensive Squarespace subscription month after month hoping that this is the month where I’m struck with divine inspiration to write something. I guess today is in fact, that day. I have N16,485 in my account and yesterday and after a month of reading money diaries on zikoko, it occurred to me that everybody else in the world is making more money than me so what the hell do I have to lose. I’ve been scared to write something too whiny, too narcissistic, too this too that and yet opening myself up to all sorts of free writing opportunities. It occurred to me that, if I’m writing for free for other people, I might as well write for free for my damn self. So here I am, again.

After starting again the millionth time, I have to tell you, starting again sucks. I feel foolish. I live in such a constant state of embarrassment,that I don’t even remember how it feels to NOT be embarrassed. Everytime I put myself out afresh, everytime I start a new idea or whatever, everytime I say “hey I’m looking for a job in this AGAIN”, I feel sooo embarrased. There is nothing I’ve wanted more than having one clear vision for my life, one goal that I can latch on to and be like yes, this is THE ONE. But lord, I have so many visions and all of them feel like THE ONE. And it’s so hard to just pick one and forget everything else which is what everyone says you HAVE to do right?

I think a bigger problem than having too many ideas or life vision or whatever is waiting for permission from other people before you do anything. Someone said if you have interests, you have to do it for yourself first, it’s like that with everything else, if you want a career, you have to believe in it for yourself. Like writing- I paid for this expensive ass blog, I’ve been writing as long as I can remember, but still instead of creating content for myself, I’m bending over backwards to create for other people- for someone else to tell me this is how I’m supposed to be doing things.

I think that’s probably the worst part.