Voici l'Agrique

Me upon arrival

Dakar Airport

Suunrise

going to hotel

 Bonjour tout le monde,

We made it safely and relatively quickly to Senegal.  We landed early in New York and landed early in Dakar.  Mindy, Brayden, and myself had a fun experience on the flight across the ocean.  We were seated by a girl from Canada that was headed to Senegal to do some volunteer work as part of her major when she started to ask questions.  We were able to teach a sort of first lesson and give her a copy of the Book of Mormon.  It was a lot of fun to have a missionary experience again and to bear testimony.  It was a cool thing to see the African coast illuminated against the dark ocean and dark night sky as we approached we were able to perfectly see, due to city lights, the most western point of mainland Africa. We landed in Dakar and made it slowly through customs.  The hectic crowd of people pushing for bags and leaving was a bit unusual as nobody let you in, if anything they would push you out of the way, one needs to be a bit more aggressive her than back home.

After regrouping we met our bus and its drivers and headed to our hotel.  We drove through the city and along the coast where we saw several people beginning there exercises for the day; they would use logs to hold their feet for sit-ups, running, stretching, and I even saw a bench press using old tires as weights.  We made it to out hotel about 7:00am local time and then slept for a few hours before we held church services as a group in the hotel's conference room.  Church was a lot of fun and we were able to do it with the Smiley family that works at the U.S. Embassy in the State Department, and another girl doing a study abroad from Occidental College in L.A..  It was a lot of fun and the Spirit was strong during testimony meeting.

We then headed out to the city to walk around and to attempt to orient ourselves.  The people our super friendly!  Due to French colonization and European visitors we aren't really stared at, more just greeted and our searched out as customers.  There is a lot of cool stuff to buy and I will have to be wise in doing so.  Plenty of people were happy to happy to try and teach us Wolof words, which is their first language before French.  It is a pretty fun language.  After seeing the city we headed to a restaurant for some much needed food.  There were three dishes that we sort of shared.  Two with white rice and one with a red rice.  The meats were beef in one, chicken, in another, and fish in the third.  It looked scary, but tasted fantastic.  Towards the end of our meal the power went out, which is apparently rather common, but our hotel had power so when we returned from the restaurant, all was well.

I woke-up about an hour ago, 4:45am local time, and turned on the tv to discover the demise of Osama bin Laden.  While I am excited as an American for this long awaited report, I have to be happy that people tend to think we're European.  That being said, there is no reason to worry.  Senegal is a relatively peaceful country that does not harbor ant-American feelings and they do not support terrorists.  But when big events occur like the news from yesterday, it is not to have a buffer between those that may be upset.

more of my view

my room

view from my hotel

Dakar

Presidential Palace

Atlantic

End of dinner, beginning of power outage

Night view during outage