Spring Break, Day 6

Friday, March 16

It would be inaccurate to say it started raining when I woke u, because I actually woke up many times throughout the night, but the time I woke up and it was becoming daylight, it began to rain. Up until this point, I had yet to experience raining in West Africa. It's been the dry season since I've been here, but the dry season is just starting to end, so I got my first West African rain. Even though I was extremely tired, I immediately jumped out of bed and said to the wind, "Is that rain?" I went out to the back porch, and indeed, it was rain. It was so beautiful seeing the rain hitting all that water. What was even more amazing was the sound. At first it was just a trickle, and I had laid back down and almost drifted back into sleep, but then came crashing down by far the loudest thunderbolt I have ever heard in my entire life. It seriously sounded like the earth had just broken in half or something. Right after the thunder, the rain got crazy, and all I could hear was water hitting more water really fast and really hard. I didn't get up to see it, but I did drift off for the ump-teenth time to the sound of that rain.

The next time I woke up, the rain had stopped and the sun had really come out. For some reason, I felt like I had slept until 2 in the afternoon, but in reality it was only 10 in the morning. I wanted to just sleep all day long, not just because it would have been awesome laying in bed all day, but something about the stilt village had me kind of hypnotized or something. A woman came rowing by sellings beans and gari, and since the hotel breakfast was extremely overpriced, I bought that woman's beans and gari. And they were delicious. That woke me up pretty well, so with that, we were all ready to leave the stilt village, probably the only one we will ever see, and go back to land. We had a very pleasant boat ride back, and we had a great conversation that will be the topic of a future blog (because it was just that special).

As we got closer to land, we started getting some more dirty looks from people in boats, just as we had gotten on the way out to the village. I wonder what they were thinking. Anyway, we got some pineapple and then caught a taxi to Cotonou. We asked the driver to drop us off at the station for Porto-Novo, the capital of Benin. As soon as we got out and asked someone about Porto-Novo, a man came and started grabbing our bags and saying, "Come this way, follow me." (Well, I imagine he said that... I don't speak French, you know). He took us to a taxi that a was a little longer but more narrow than other taxis. There were three people in the front, three in the middle, and one girl in the back. They told us to get in the back, so two of us got in and we figured out that there was no way another person could fit in the car. So then the driver kicked the girl in the back out of the cab. We were really upset and confused by this. Her money's just as good as ours. Why should she get kicked out?

We were just about to get out of the cab when a few other ladies started getting angry about something (none of us had any idea what they were talking about... when people argue, they use their native language, not French or English, which always makes these arguments confusing). They were arguing with the driver and some other lady in the cab, and so they left. So then the girl who got kicked out of the back got back in. She didn't seem upset by any of this, just confused. Soon another person got in and we finally left for Porto-Novo. Since the city is so close, it only took about an hour to get there.

Porto-Novo is the capital of Benin, even though Cotonou is much bigger. It's a city of about 250,000 residents, a good size for a city to be. The guidebook had said that there wasn't a whole lot to do there, but that it was a really pretty city. I was in the mood for a medium-sized, boring pretty city by this point in the trip. However, when the cab dropped us off, it didn't look much different than some radom town on the road from Accra to Cape Coast. There was nothing but dirt roads and small shops. We thought that surely there must be more than what we were seeing before us. We asked a few people where centreville was (downtown). The first woman we asked told us there was no centreville. The next woman told us that we were in centreville, which I found very unamusing. Another man told us he wasn't sure where centreville was, but he gave us a direction to walk in that he thought would be good. Great.

So we walked down dirt roads for about 30 minutes, feeling a bit discouraged and a lot disappointed. We would have been happy with just a cool place to hang out, but there was no such thing. So we kept walking, changing direction from the one the guy had told us, and soon we came to a paved room. All of a sudden, I noticed the road ahead as well as the sidewalk was covered in beatiful grey patterned bricks, the kind of touch that makes a city feel like a classic. Well, we had just found centreville. Apparently those people we had talked to earlier have never taken that 30-minute walk from where they work to town or else they just didn't understand what we were asking. We found three zemidjans drivers and asked them if they would give us a 30-minute tour of the city. They agreed, so we each hopped on the back of a motorcycle and off we went. All of a sudden, my dreams of being in a quiet pretty city were realized. Porto-Novo is a beautiful city. The city is what one would imagine a colonial Brazilian city to be like with that distinct Portuguese architecture. All the paint on the buildings is slightly fading away, but not to the point of decay, adding another element of that classic feel. There were many beautiful buildings in Porto-Novo such as the cathedral, a mosque that was in the style of a church (so incredible!), and the main voodoo temple. There was also a beautiful park in the middle of the city with benches and a nice green lawns. On top of the beauty of the city, the people were also noticably more dressed up and very friendly. I couldn't believe that this place was only an hour away from Cotonou. The difference is incredible. We met a nice man named George who worked at the cultural center. He watched our bags for us while we were in the city, even though looking back we probably should have just stayed the night.
After the motorcycles dropped us off, we explored a bit, hitting up the market and a telecenter to call our parents. We tried to go inside of the mosque, but it was Friday so we couldn't enter.

We visited the Palace of the King (well, it was for several hundred years... now it's a museum). The tour guide showed us around the palace, pointing out to the us the uses of every room. The rooms were very Roman, with three or four different levels in each room that started low in the center and then went up on the sides. There were rooms for bathing, eating, relaxation, receiving guests, and there was even a suicide room. Only the King can enter that room, and he can only enter if he plans to commit suicide. Two kings have used the room before. The tour guide told us that when a king died, all 18 of his wives had to die as well, as so they would poison the women and then bury them alive with the king, and then they'd all die from the poison. Pretty crazy.

After the palace, we went to get our bags and then we were hungry. Tania and I got a beef and pepper sandwich to split from a street vendor. Rachel got a mayonaisse sandwich (barf) since she doesn't eat meat, and then we went to that beautiful park to sit on the grass and enjoy our evening meal as it was getting dark. As we were finishing up, a group of 10 young children attacked us (if you haven't figured out now, when I use the word 'attack,' I'm only referring to the level of enthusiam with which they approached us). They started asking us our names and where we were from, who's the president of our home country, our emails, and all other sorts of random questions. They told us it was for their homework, but when we looked at their papers, it had nothing to do with strangers' nationalities and their presidents. We left those kids after about 10 minutes to go to Ouidah, the voodoo capital. Of course, we had to take a tro-tro to Cotonou first. I sat in the back with Rachel and two other women, and halfway through the ride, the seat gave out and we all went flying back at the same time. It was pretty funny (well, the first time anyway).

So we got to Cotonou, already our third visit to the city. We were dropped off in a random place not knowing where to go to get to Ouidah. So we asked someone. They directed us to go across the street, so we did. Then we asked someone else who said it was just up the road, so we walked a little further. We kept asking people where it was, and just like with finding the hotel the first night and finding the American cultural center the day before, people kept telling us to go just a little bit further in a certain direction. After walking for about 20 minutes, we asked a zemidjan driver where we could get a taxi to Ouidah. He told us that we should get on his motorcylce because it was too far to walk. We'd be walking all night, he told us. Well, he was right. Even though I really didn't want to, I hopped onto the back of a zemidjan on a Friday night, essentially throwing myself into a video came called something like "Thunder Road Death Match." But I survived, and it turned out the zemidjan driver was right. It took about 15 minutes to get to the taxi by motorcycle. Who knows how long we would've been walking.

Rachel and I got stuck in the front of this bush taxi (remember, 6 people). I sat on the inside, practically on top of the gear shift. Halfway through the ride, my butt started to go numb and Rachel fell asleep on me, her weight pushing me further and further into the driver until finally I woke her up. We got to Ouidah and told the taxi driver the hotel we wanted to stay at. He drove us right past Ouidah to the beach where the hotel we had chosen was. We discovered, though, that the hotel only had the most expensive rooms available at that moment which cost about 18,000 CFA ($36) a night. We didn't even have 18,000 CFA on us. No seriously, we only had about 15,000 CFA and we discovered that the only ATM Ouidah had was an Ecobank, which doesn't accept Visa cards. So we sat outside of the hotel on the dirt road for a long time, waiting for a taxi or a motorcycle to come by. It seemed very unlikely considering how late and deserted it was. The guy at the hotel kept trying to convince us to stay, and we kept trying to explain that we just didn't have the money. Finally a zemidjan came by and agreed to take us back to Ouidah to a cheaper hotel. Tania went first since she could actually talk to the people at the hotel. While Rachel and I were waiting for Tania to come back, we sat in the hotel with all the workers and possibly some of their friends, about six people in total. There were music video playing on the television. They were all so hilarious. Whoever directed the videos must have just gotten their first blue screen and had a field day with it. Each one was just a woman or some group of strangely dressed men singing and dancing with random images of mountains and buildings and whatever else in the background. It was pretty great.

The zemidjan took us to the new hotel, only 5000 CFA a night. We had a small room with a double bed and a fan. I needed some water immediately because I felt dehydrated, and all they had was a frozen sache of water. All the stores in the town were closed, so I had to deal. I stayed up for a long time, trying all kinds of creative methods to make it melt a little faster. I stuck the bag under my armpit, breathed on it, ran water under it... just to get that little bit of water. Then I layed down and immediately passed out, unaware of what surprise would await me several hours later...