THE ONE WITH THE BLACKOUT

Last Wednesday, while we were having dinner, all the lights suddenly went off. This is nothing extraordinary in Gabon. You can depend on power cuts more than on planes leaving as scheduled. We thus took our glasses of wine and positioned ourselved on the terrace to assess the situation. It was the usual: around a hundred metres on the one side and fifty on the other all the street lamps were off. Our location is quite unhappy - if anybody is to have a blackout, it's going to be us, just the tiny square of land occupied by our building and little more.

We were sipping our wine, rather relaxed, as we knew what was going to happen: in about twenty minutes the lights would be back on. We were thus very surprised when, after about twenty minutes, all the lights within our sight went... off. Now that was new. We observed the city buried in complete darkness. Spooky. We went to bed thinking the electricity would come back in the morning.

It didn't. The entire Thursday and the following night the whole city had no power. Most of the food in our fridge went bad in the heat. Computer and mobile batteries were uncharged. No light, no air-conditioning, no lift. For 36 hours.

The lack of electricity is uncomfortable but bearable. The real problem was of different nature: we live on the eighth floor, provided with water by an electric pump. When there is no power, we have no water. In this case, for 36 hours. It also means we must get down eight floors (on foot), fill whatever bottles we have with water and go up eight floors again. During this blackout we only did it once, luckily.

Positive sides? Well, romantic, candle-light suppers and a perfect excuse to read a book all day as no computer work could be done (I don't work at the school on Thursdays and Friday was a day off). Oh, and the fact that they fixed it before Saturday night, as we were originally told they would.

TIA.

PS. I wrote this entry at midday and the very moment I clicked "Publish Post", there was another blackout. African irony, I suppose.

For those of you who are not Friends fans (like us): sorry about the incomprehensible title.