Just smile and nod, smile and nod.

So the past couple of days have been interesting attempting to communicate with others. It’s quite hilarious actually. It’s funny how many times I have just smiled and nodded already. I’m still in the getting used to their dialect phase of the trip. It’s getting way better, but sometimes I still find myself not understanding anything someone is saying, and it’s French. Who would have thought French could have been spoken so different than what I’m used to! Saturday, one of many stories, when we were talking to our landlord, and she was showing us how to properly wash clothes, we had about a 2 hour-conversation, consisting of little talks of like 3 minutes, and then us parting ways for 15 minutes, then talking again for 3 minutes because of a miss communication, and that process repeated for awhile! The first time we talked, she mentioned something about someone who can wash our clothes, which is a total normal conversation. But then we started to not understand each other. When she came back, I swear she was talking about someone who was going to wash our floors, so I was like cool! But then I heard the word clothes, and I asked for prices, then she had a blank look on her face, then she mentioned an iron, and then I was confused, and it just went on from then. It was hilarious, because now that I look back on it, I’m pretty sure the whole time she was talking about the clothes washer person, but I went from understanding that there was a floor washer, to something about an iron, to something about someone who will take our bed sheets, then back to someone who will wash our clothes. At that point, I wasn’t even sure of prices and I remembered her asking something about a specific day...wow was that confusing! Anyway, at night time we ended going back to try and get a real understanding, because we weren’t sure if we like accidentally signed up for something haha! Again, I kept understanding ‘floor washer’. In the end, we now have someone who is going to wash our clothes, which we kind of are ‘iffy’ about, but we will tackle that subject once it comes up again! Haha.

I am so glad we have had someone from Benin with us every time we want to go out and buy something, because I’m pretty sure we would basically fail to the tenth power! Every time we have been buying something at a street market, I just end up looking at our contact and the street vendor go back and forth, back and forth, not understanding one single word. We end up with like 9 onions in our hands, when we only wanted 2! Haha. I’m pretty sure if it were up to me, I would accidentally have given them like 100$ for a half a pineapple, no lie! So glad we have our contacts!

So for now at least, to those I can’t understand, I’m going to stick to my smile and nod technique! Seems to be working so far, haha!