Adventures with Angela: The End

After our unsuccessful day trying to get out to Gorée Island, we took the next day to go out to Madeleine Island (which you can read about here if you haven’t already). The next day was Saturday, our only other chance to get out to Gorée Island, which we did in the morning (you can read more about Gorée here). In the afternoon we went to Rebekah and Hildo’s wedding, friends I met through church.

We are in the same small group at church, and Rebekah & I are both English teachers, so we have a lot in common. They had a nice civil ceremony at the Hotel de Ville (City Hall) and an outdoor, evening reception at a restaurant near where we live (they live down the street from me). It was a lovely celebration and I’m so glad we could join them for it!

For Palm Sunday we decided to go out to the Abbaye Keur Moussar for Mass. My friend Lisa joined us, so that made for a change of pace. Our morning started out a bit rough because I had reserved a taxi with a driver Lisa knew, so when we got there, a taxi pulled up to us at the meeting point (not just on the road, but at a specific meeting point in a parking lot) and I asked him if he’s the driver we had reserved to go out to Keur Moussa, and he said yes. Lisa wasn’t there yet, so I just told him we were waiting for one more person. Lisa pulled up in a taxi and jumped in the one we were going to take. Off we go… but then she realizes it’s not the driver she knows. I ask some more questions, and he has trouble understanding French. Eventually we figure out that it wasn’t the right driver, he wasn’t the one we’d reserved… We call the other driver and he’s back at the meeting point waiting for us. I make the other taxi driver turn around and take us back and we take our actual taxi out there! We’d scheduled a pretty early departure, so we weren’t even late!

The Benedictine Monastery is about an hour outside Dakar and was founded in 1961 when 9 French monks arrived to start the monastery. It earned the title of “Abbaye” in 1984 and is known for its Gregorian chants with African influence. Because it was Palm Sunday, there were a lot more people there than there normally would have been. We did the precession with our palms, then headed to the stairs to see if we could get a seat upstairs and we were lucky enough to get the last few seats, albeit not together. Good thing too, because Palm Sunday mass is the longest one, and they sang the whole thing, which made it even longer. It was pretty cool actually! When it was over we went into their little store and bought a bunch of stuff, including their well-known artisan cheese and CDs of their famous music.

Friendly tortoise coming to say hi to Lisa

Afterwards we decided to stop by the Turtle Sanctuary and see what Fulbright the Tortoise was up to. He’s doing pretty well. Because I’m an adopted parent of one of the tortoises, I get in for free, and Guillermo was nice enough to let Lisa and Angela go in with me. I introduced Lisa and Angela to Bill Clinton as well (you can read more about the Village des Tortues here in my Birthday Blog).

The next day we went out to the Bandia reserve (I went on Christmas morning with the gang, so you can read more about that here). The only major change that happened since Christmas was the horns being removed from the two rhinos. The morning after some poachers broke into a French zoo and killed the rhino right there for its horn, they decided to shave down the horns of the two rhinos out here. They then widely advertised the fact that the rhinos on their reserve have no horns.

Rhino horns are kind of like horse hooves in the sense that they can be shaved down to a certain point without causing harm to the animal. They will also eventually grow back, but it does take a while. Since these rhinos are on a reserve, they do not need their horns for defensive purposes, so it’s safer for them not to have the horns at all.

The next day was Angela’s last, but her flight was very late at night, so we went to the Senghor museum (the subject of my next blog) and hung out on the beach. All in all it was a great time hanging out in Senegal with Angela!!