Han Solo

We finally did it, we dared to go buy groceries and do random errands all by ourselves, with none of our contacts! It was actually way more successful than I thought it was going to be. We were able to communicate better than we thought we were going to be able to. I guess being equipped in the art of pointing and nodding helped a lot too! Haha. As far as we were concerned we didn’t get ripped off either! We were warned that if there was not a Beninese with us, then we probably would be ripped off, but we calculated the prices and they were considerably cheap, so we thought well, why not!

We did however, for the first time, try to barter at one point, which was a complete...epic...fail! It was quite hilarious! We were going to buy this bag of rice from a street vendor, and we did not have a clue to how much they cost, so we offered lower than the price she told us obviously. Apparently we did not look intense or convincing enough, since she was like “umm...no” then she offered the same price as before. Then us three went off and talked for like 2 minutes, obviously breaking any advantage we had. Haha. We ended up getting nervous and ran away, definitely got to rethink our strategy next time!

The one part that we forgot about was that we were going to have to cross the road alone as well...dun dun dun! The roads here are a little chaotic, no cross walks and a million motorcycles everywhere going everywhere! You basically just have to step out slowly, and hope that people go around you. We ended up standing at the side of the road just waiting for a huge gap in the cars to cross...but after 10 minutes of waiting, that wasn’t going to happen! Haha. We stepped out bravely and just booked it! We made it across safely and the cars went around us, and some of them even stopped! We’re so pro at crossing the road now that we can do it with our eyes closed! K well, not really, that would not end well, not end well at all! Haha.

We definitely successfully completed that solo mission! Score one for the three Yovo’s!

Hilarious P.S. : I was asked, while on our solo adventure, if I had 2 wives, bahahaha! Im pretty sure a lot of people think that here, but he was the first one to actually come up to me and ask me that! Hilarious!