First Day Out on the Town

We all got up for our first day of shopping and getting random things we needed. Our contact had told us that he would pick us up at 10am. A little side note to those who are unaware, African time is a little different than what us Westerners are used to haha! Olivier had joined us at our house at 11am I think, and our contact had finally arrived at 1pm. It was alright in my books, because I ended up falling asleep till he arrived! Yay for sleep. We went out for lunch, bought cell phones, bought some random stuff from street vendors, like power bars and such. We learnt very quickly to get the street vendors to test electronics they sell you, because one of our power bars was dysfunctionalL. Then we were off to the market.

Patrice had taken us to what I guess would be the higher class part of Benin, outside the city. He took us to this place called the hypermarket, which is like a supermarket from the UK I think, so there were a lot of stuff in there that were familiar, but also a lot of stuff we were not, but that’s the fun of being in another culture :D. We saw a lot of other white people in there. It was surprising to see other white people haha. (Never thought I would say that haha!)

It ended up being really stressful shopping haha! We were never sure if the prices were good or anything because of the currency and the exchange rate, and never knew if what we were buying was any good to begin with haha! We ended up doing alright though, tried getting all the food groups. Getting meat was stressful oh boy! Carleigh and I ended up standing there for like 15 mins just staring at the meat selection. We had no idea what to get because there were not any like familiar names haha! So we just bought some random meat and it was really good! We had some good laughs in there though, including a particular situation with the apples! When we bought our fruit, this lady took it and put a receipt on the bag, so the cashier knew how much it is. When we bagged 6 apples, we had thought we just spent 60 euros on 6 apples...which is approx. 80-90$ Canadian...OOPS! We were like freaking out, but we had already picked them out, and the receipt was confusing. So the whole time, we were going around the store laughing/freaking out about our 85$ apples! (thinking we accidentally purchased specialty imported gold plated ones or something). Little side note, we had also purchased 6 pears, which were almost the same price, but we weren’t freaking out about the pears, only the apples...?!?!...I guess pears cost that much...?! haha! They ended up being normal priced apples, which was a huge relief!

We came home to relax, and ended up having another battle with that pesky cockroach! ROUND 2! After a worthy battle, that sneaky cockroach was just too sly and fast (I swear that thing has a cloak or something!)