Arrivé!

I made it to Sénégal!

It took about 3 1/2 hours to JFK, followed by an 8 hour flight straight to Dakar. On our second flight, Miles (another kid in the group) and I made friends with this girl from Canada who was sitting by him on the row behind me. We had the chance to talk with her about the church and explain a little bit about missions and stuff. I gave her one of the Book of Mormons that I brought with me, and she was happy to take it, thinking she'll get bored in her four months here in Sénégal. Yay! What a great way to start off our trip!

After I got a good 5 hours of sleep on the rest of the flight, we flew into Dakar, but what was cool was that it was dark but the buildings outside were lit up and we were able to see perfectly the outline of the very western-most point of Africa from the air. So cool!

Here's Professeur Lee and I just outside the airport, waiting to get on our bus:

We arrived at about 5:30 AM, so on the way to the hotel, we got to see an amazing African sunrise (the picture doesn't do it justice):

One thing that was funny on the drive over was that along the beaches, they have all sorts of workout equipment everywhere for people to use on the beach-- apparently they're really into fitness here!

Made it to our hotel, l'hôtel Nina, where we all slept from about 7 to 1:30, just in time for church at 2

A cute little family here working for the state department and another student studying abroad joined us at the hotel for a nice sacrament meeting and sunday school. It was great. I've missed having church in French! We had a testimony meeting, and we really felt the Spirit, especially when the father of the little family talked about how much it meant for them to have other members around them.

After church, Madame Thompson gave us a little tour of the city! We first learned a few words in Wolof (the local language here) from this guy outside our hotel, who said that he would teach us two new words every day :) Cool. So, we walked ALL around town and saw tons of cool things. The catholique cathedral:

The ocean!

Tons of Mosques everywhere (which this may or may not be...)

Other highlights: getting hassled by people wanting us to buy their stuff, seeing a Casino and Leader Price (grocery stores that are also in New Cal), cats everywhere... random, the Senegal "white house", among other things.

And then finally we went to this restaurant nearby to eat dinner. We had delicious salade Nicoise (yes, that is tuna fish in the middle, and yes, it was so good), and then a lot of rice with fish and a different rice with beef and some random vegetables... interesting. There was a wrestling match on the TV, which is the national sport here, so they're all pretty crazy about it. We tried not to laugh ;)

So we came back to our hotel, my roommate finally got here (her plane was later than the group flight), and now I'm off to bed to get ready for tomorrow!