A happy weekend!

Hi guys!

I thought I'd report on my weekend, because it was rather excellent. Friday I stayed late at work to meet these two girls who are in the Peace Corps and will be teaching English classes at the Refugee Community Centre. They were nice, and after their meeting with Florence we adventured to the Community Centre to figure out where it was, what supplies it had, etc. I then went home and did some laundry (which in itself is exciting because everything gets dirty so quickly here). I met up with them again later for dinner, and ate remarkably tasty pad thai! I think it was actually better than I've ever eaten in Canada, or maybe I was just so hungry and bored with food that it seemed particularly good. At any rate it was awesome.

Saturday morning I went back to the Community Centre to help the girls with their class. So many people were there! We only had a small room available to us and it was jam-packed full of people. It made the teaching a bit hard, since there was no space to write properly and everyone was talking over each other, but I think it was a good start! I sadly wasn't very helpful, as I have no idea how to teach English while the other girls do, but it was interesting and fun. I think I"ll be there most Saturday mornings (which sadly means no sleeping in, but that's ok).

After the English class I went to play softball with these people the American girl who used to work at the HCR knows. It was kind of an odd bunch of people, but I met a couple of very nice American women! After a very hot and sweaty game (we played from noon to 2pm with no shade), I went to a market with the two girls and got fun things. The market was kind of awesome. There's one really superly big market in Cotonou called Dantokpa, and then a few smaller ones. This was one of the smaller ones, and was entirely manageable in size while still having lots of fun things. I bought some tomatoes, an eggplant, some tv series on DVD (for $2 each and including the Latin American telenovela we watched daily in Kenya!), and some red hibiscus flowers. The flowers are my favourite purchase - you boil them in lots of water with mint, then add sugar, and you have this awesome dark-purple drink called bissap. It looks very ominous due to its colour, but it's super tasty!

Saturday night I met up with the Peace Corps girls again and went out for dinner (again). Most of them are from very rural areas and so when they come into town they eat all sorts of Western food. So we went to this restaurant called Berlin and ate remarkably tasty pizza! After food we went back to one girl's house and hung around for a bit. They were all going out to a bar at a hotel after, but I decided I'd head home because it was already late. It's quite sketchy to take zems (motorcycle-taxis) late at night, but I went back to the house with my German friend (who came along with all the Peace Corps girls) so it was ok.

Sunday was quiet - it was super hot so all I did was cook (tasty pasta with my tomatoes and eggplant), read, and make my bissap. And no-bake cookies for the office. They turned out super sticky so I had to freeze them, but they were tasty! At night, I went to yoga at some woman's house. While kind of weird (because I only knew (sort of) one of the people), it was quite nice!

So all in all a pretty good weekend!! I think I'm just going to have to keep going to these somewhat weird activities to meet people :) I'm a lot happier here with things to do.

Anyway, I think it's lunchtime. I never know whether there's lunch at work or no... I think today is a no, so I guess I'll eat my peanuts. I'm going to have to start bringing food with me or I'll starve!

love Katie