Tourist Endeavours

For the first time in just under 2.5 months, we were able to visit some tourist locations here in Benin! It was awesome!
The day started with us 6 shoving and squishing into a taxi, clearly suited for 3 people...It was pretty fun, and definitely grew us closer, literally haha. An hour later, doesn’t feel so fun anymore though, kind of turned painful...haha! We all piled out of the taxi when the doors opened and we had arrived at our first museum! It was the museum of slavery. It was so crazy and shocking to hear about the things that here in Benin all those years ago. They would sell these like dinky pipes for 5 slaves, the King would have slaves killed for his amusement, they would shove the slaves in boats in which half would die on the journey, the King would have 41 of his wives buried alive with him when he died...Crazy to think that things like that actually happened! I couldn’t imagine even begin to imagine the things those people went through...
The next stop on our venture was the python museum...yes, you heard me right, PYTHON MUSEUM...or so we thought it was a museum. It turned out to be this temple where voodoo priests would come and like worship the pythons, offer sacrifices and execute rituals. It really wasn’t what we expected, but nonetheless were still excited to get to the snakes! The guy brought out a python from the temple for us to hold and get used to it before we entered the temple. The snakes felt so weird but cool when you held them! They are surprisingly very calm creatures! I kind of got a little sketched out when it started crawling up and licking my arm! But a fun experience all in all. He finally let us enter the temple thing, and to all of our surprise there were like 100 pythons just let loose in this temple room place. It was sooo intense! They were everywhere, just roaming around freely. It was a little sketchy but awesome all at the same time! We were able just to pick one up whenever and put it around our neck and move them around, it was awesome! At one point this one python kept like crawling around me into and around my backpack, it was hilarious! I have definitely grown to love pythons now, awesome creatures!
After leaving the python temple, we decided to hit the beach! Even though they warned us it was a very long walk, we decided to anyway, there was a cool breeze that would keep us sane in the African heat, so we decided, why not! The long, long road to the beach was the same path that the slaves walked all those years ago to get to the boats. It was crazy to think that the slaves walked on the very paths we were walking, crazy crazy stuff! It ended up being a little longer than we thought, taking like 2 hours, but the breeze from the ocean was worth a million bucks! When we arrived at the beach, I couldn’t help but just get overwhelmed by it all. We were the only people on the entire beach, no one in distance of sight. The ocean was so incredible, water as far as the eye can see in every direction! I don’t know why but I felt like I was on top of the world when I looked out into the vast and powerful ocean. To know that God made that, such a powerful yet beautiful thing, amazes me, purely captivates me! It was an amazing & awesome day that we got to spend with some of the leaders of DRIME Benin!