If Magritte were here, he'd do it too...

"Tu aime bien le togo-jeen, hein?" My African brother, Antoine, was looking at me with a grin lying somewhere a few steps across the line to mischievous. I had only shot a passing glance at the collection of unmarked bottles sitting on the table by the front door, but soon found myself being pushed towards the mystery liquids. Each bottle had obviously been used for another purpose earlier in their lives, their peeling labels displaying 'scotch' or 'Chinese plum wine' now guarding something very obviously something else. These are the things we are warned about long before we step foot in a foreign country - our training classes have topics like 'cultural awareness', 'dysentery' and, from time to time, 'unmarked liquids you most definitely shouldn't drink even though we know you're going to anyway' - I happened to like that group exercise quite a bit. Flakes of peppers or roots or berries sometimes flowed out of the bottles as shots were being poured, the sediment from each bottle giving only the slightest hint as to what had been fermenting there in the tropical heat. I stood with my companions around the table, the table that sat under the dangling fluorescent light that hung outside the sheet that acts as the front door of the house, the house that sat 5 minutes from the training center where I have classes everyday, which is an hour and a half from Lome by taxi, which itself is half a world away from anyone reading this. I stood there, a world away from some and 5 minutes from others, beside Togolese neighbors and family, a glass of something that looked deceptively like paint thinner and smelled a bit like kerosene in my hand. Murmurs in the local patois of Ewe and French floated between us as we continued to pour glasses for everyone, the occasional smile thrown my way followed by the word 'togogin'. "Tu aime bien le togo-jeen, hein?" I wasn't very sure if I liked it or not - as surprising as it sounds, I'm not that used to ingesting equatorial bathtub wine, but it was as good a time as any to find out. As the last glass found its place, we all poured a bit on the ground for les ancestres and then threw back one of the many unforgettable life experiences that I've found here.

Come to find out, I sleep like a baby after four good life experiences.