After our make-over during the bus tour last week, we decided to go to a tailor for a real Nigerian dress - to impress our trainees on the last day of the training. The tailor, the one Ilse recommended, has a shop at Utako market, a market where they sell fabrics, food, drinks, music, household goods et cetera. Everybody tries to seduce you to buy their stuff and asks you inside their shop: "just have a look madame, just one minute.."

During an earlier visit at Utako market we met Chris, who sells pasta and tinned tomatoes. The market place itself was closed at that time, but many of the shops were doing business along the street. Where are you from, he asked. The Netherlands, we replied. And yes, he knew Holland very well and had lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years. He welcomed us to Nigeria and gave us some bananas and dried peanuts as a gift.

This time, we couldn't find his shop. The authorities have 'cleaned up' the market place and surrounding streets, which means that squatters - people that have build and attached their shops to the official ones - have been removed. That's really a pity, since very few people have enough money to rent their own shop, let alone that there would be enough space available...

When we were at the shoe shop - to find matching shoes to our dress, we heard a noise of people hitting sticks on tin moving through the tiny shopping streets of the market. The police of 'cleanliness, tidiness and maintenance of hygienic' had arrived. They were harassing shop-owners to put their stuff further back inside their shop. Also the shoe shop owner was yelled at, because one of his goods was sticking one centimeter outside the official borders of his shop.

Yep, Abuja has to be clean and neat. But it keeps the capitol city quite dull compared to other African cities. More important, it complicates it for many people to make a living. Hopefully Chris is still doing alright.