A day of rest in Conakry

Today we had no classes, and the plan was to take a sightseeing tour of Conakry.

Before we could get our adventure, we had some logistics to take care of.

First of all, we moved the food preparation enterprise to our house today. Aly's mom had wanted to do all of the cooking for us. She has been preparing rice and sauce for us every day, and then having it delivered to us from across town. She was cooking great food, but the traffic on the way from her house to ours was interfering with eating times, so we have now moved the operations to our house here. Fanta and tanti Bountou, the guardian's wife, are now responsible for the cooking.

That means that we had to build a pantry of the supplies that would be used every day, and then also the specific needs for today. We had use of one cooking stove (which I'm now told is too small, so we are getting another big one tomorrow), but you must have two - one for the sauce and one fore the rice, so we had to buy a stove, and we had to buy the charcoal for the stove. Then we had to buy a big bag of rice, and tomatoes and potatoes and onions, and maggi, and oil... I say we had to buy it - all that I needed to do was participate in the making of the list and fund the new enterprise. Papis and Tanti Bountou went to the market together to buy everything.

Here's our new cooking stove:

Here's the other cooking stove that was here:

Here is a rather small version of the mortar and pestle thing they use here:

Here's Fanta and Suke cutting up the bulare:

Here's the two oils we bought - that palm oil is gorgeous! Aly wants me to try to carry some back on the plane - i have no idea how that will go over. I did once carry a whole lot of smoked catfish without any trouble...

Here's some bags of potatoes and carrots and a bottle of vinegar:

Once Papis returned from the market, Aly's sister had arrived who is a tailor. So thus we entered a big discussion about what we would like her to do, and how many of what we need, and taking measurements of everyone, and writing down our list of requests. By then it was after noon!

We commenced on a tour of Conakry in the method of the locals - took a regular taxi all the way to downtown - four people in the back seat and two in the passenger seat. Papis had the taxi drop us at the big main commercial port and we walked through the city center. Below is the big church of the archdiocese of Conakry. You can't see it in this shot, but there's a big painting effort going on down the left side of the building, a lovely cream color.

We walked past the presidential palace, and I didn't try to take pictures. Even though there were no military in sight, I've heard loads of stories of people who tried to take pictures and the military came to them and said it was forbidden.  So we walked all through the downtown, checking out the sites, and around the Novotel hotel and through the fishing area and Boulbinet where I stayed on my first trip to Conakry in 2002.  Below is where the fishing boats come in.

This is the Palais du Nations, which still has a lot of scaffolding around it, so I think it is not finished yet.

 After that, we changed some money and visited my favorite internet cafe, Mouna, which wasn't quite as nice as the last time I visited, but still had a lot of computers, decent speed connections, and U.S. keyboards, which makes life so much nicer. After that we stopped into La Gondole for ICE CREAM!

Then we took a taxi to Coleah, where Aly's family lives, and visited with his neighbors and family for a bit and then headed to the grand market at Madina. On the way out of Coleah, we ran into one of the Fiston's friends, and I took a quick picture of him.

So then we headed to Madina market, which is quite subdued on Sunday compared with yesterday! I think that made for much better deals from the vendors! I bought some beautiful fabric that I will take a picture of tomorrow and post. In the meantime, I took a couple of little video shots from the bridge that goes to Madina.