Day 13 - Beach day

Enjoyed catching up on sleep today.  Pretty sure my family was judging me because I didn’t get up until about ten, when I’m pretty sure they wake up around 5 or 6am most mornings.  I don’t care though, it felt good.  I didn’t get nearly enough sleep when we were at Saint-Louis.  I spent most of the morning just hanging out, talking to friends and listening to music that I like for a change (they listen to American music all the time here, but for the most part its rap or reggae, which aren’t particularly my favorites.  I was missing my rock and alternative.)  In the afternoon I decided to accompany a couple of the boys and their host brothers/host brothers’ friends to the beach.  For some reason, when I walked through the Case de Mermoz (kind of like a concrete park near where I live, we’ve been using it as our meeting place), I was having a lot of issues with being hit on by creeps today.  One literally stopped his car to tell me that he loved me.  In English.  It was awkward.  I wound up calling Pat to find out where he lived so I didn’t have to wait for them to get to the Case.  We took a Car Rapide to the beach.  That was pretty cool.  It’s their version of a bus, but it only costs $0.20 to go anywhere in the city.  You mount the bus from the back, and there are guys that actually hang off the back of the buses to note who’s getting on so they can come collect money from some them at some point.  Once everyone who wants to has boarded, they bang on the roof to signal to the bus driver that he can move again.  It’s an interesting system.  When they get really crowded, more than just the guys who work for the Car Rapide will be hanging off the back.  Not sure it’s exactly safe, but I suppose it works.  The beach we went to was pretty nice.  There were a lot of rocks in the water though once you got out past waist height, so we determined that it wasn’t really safe to swim, since the waves coming in there were above our heads sometimes and we were afraid of being sucked into the rocks.  I know I definitely got pulled under two or three times.  You probably could have surfed there if you were willing to brave the waves to get out there.  I still haven’t really gotten used to seeing cactuses growing on the rocks here.  It doesn’t really seem like the right climate for them, but I guess they’re thriving here.