The Launch, 3 - Days Away!

This is Jazz, our event planner.  Me thinks that the gesture he is making with his hand is not a hip hop thang but a universal sign for "Yeah, the event is in less than a week but we have it down."

The Palais de la Culture is in the "Plateau," or what Issouf calls the "Manhattan" section of Abidjan. All I know is that it's the only place in town I've seen a proper cafe, but I haven't yet ventured there. Nescafe is starting to taste good to me.  In Peace Corps Morocco we used to call that "assimilating" and my co-workers have informed me that "Tu es arrivé," meaning "I've arrived." Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  Although in Peace Corps we also had the "over assimilators" -- the volunteers who went to the "Bled" i.e. the country, and would return for a rare trip to the city with eyes-wide and hair askew, and who would suddenly awake from their catatonic stuper if the word "ice-cream" was uttered.  Rumor has it that those volunteers were not experiencing culture-shock but copious amounts of contact with a local herb native to the bled. Anyway, back to the venue at hand. The Palais de la Culture was built in the late 90s with financing from the Chinese. It's probably the most impressive building in Abidjan, aside from the huge Catholic Cathedral, which is impressive more for size than aesthetic reasons.

The venue overlooks the Ébrié Lagoon.

The not-so-impressive building below is where we are getting all the sound equipment for the event.  If this were happening in the States, I would say sketchy, but here it just makes sense--you don't need expensive security equipment when your bureau looks like an abandoned building. We'll see during our run-through tomorrow if the equipment belies its storage facilities.