NO PREREQS

So! I didn’t get a chance to visit Parakou this weekend. Instead, I spent Saturday in the market at Cotonou and Sunday at home. Although I don’t have a summary of my trip to Parakou, I still did learn a lot over this past week. Here is a list of 10:       1.       The worst sound in the world is the wailing of a handful of baby goats tied together by their legs to the top of a car. It’s literally...

This weekend I will be heading to Parakou, a city about 6 hours from the capital of Cotonou, in central Benin. Thinking about this last night, I realized that I still have not written about my trip to Porto Novo, 3 weekends ago. But, better late than never! Getting this trip down in ink would be a good idea because it’s probably been my most adventurous experience in Benin. You cna also expect a post about my time in Parakou when I get back as well...

As the baby child in a family of six, I’ve never really understood what it meant to have younger or baby siblings. It’s something I’ll never experience fully, but living in a host family with 3 younger kids is the closest I think I’ll ever get to it. Forgive me if this is a bit of a boring post, but the dynamics of having younger siblings is so unique and interesting to me that I had to spend some time talking about this. I get to observe how the...

A common theme throughout all of my posts has been perspective. Money is no different. In this post, I want to talk a bit about how I value the same amount of money so differently here than I would at home. This might be a common thing for those of you who had made trips to a country with a currency valued significantly less than your home currency. For me, this is a new occurrence. The smallest coin of currency in Benin is the 5 FCFA coin (the equivalent of roughly 1 cent CAD). The bills start...

           Finalement, après une telle attente, je suis prêt donner vous ma première affiche en la belle langue de Français. Je connais il y aura beaucoup des erreurs, mais quand même, il n’y a pas mal en essayant. Si vous voir quelque erreurs flagrant, n’hésitez pas me dire dans les commentaires.  1.       Il y a une 250 pièce de monnaie. C’est bizarre que je...

EDIT: This post was supposed to go up yesterday, but I ended up getting sidetracked on my way to the cyber because Yannick wanted me to whoop his butt in foosball again (thank you to the free foosball tables at |New |Rez, I.O.U.). So tomorrow there will be another two posts up. I figure I’ve gotta start being more productive and keeping this blog updated goes hand in hand with that. Enjoy!        Today seems like...

This is a blogpost I hope a lot of my readers will be able to relate to, and take something from. I know it’s great hearing about my adventures in Benin, but with life kind of settling in this past week, I thought it would also be helpful if I addressed a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now – failure. A couple weeks ago, I got a rejection letter from McGill University telling me I was not admitted into Neuroscience, the program...

So, I am aware that this edition is late, and that I haven’t posted on my blog in over a week. Let me assure you that this is not because I have given up on the blog. I`ve been shown so much support that every day that passed without me posting, I felt extremely guilty. Although I`ve just been busy in general, I also have been preparing a long post about dealing with failure. Hopefully I will get my act together and have it up tomorrow. But for...

Here comes the second edition of 10 things I learned this week. I learned plenty of lessons since the last post, with a weekend in Ouidah first, followed by another week or work and host family, culminating with a trip to Porto Novo (the capital of Benin) this past weekend. Hope you enjoy! 1. Next time I pay a guide a ton of money to show me around some places, I should make sure they can speak English...

                A couple posts ago, in the comments it was requested that I write a little bit about how the locals perceive me, (first and foremost) a Westerner, spending time in their country. This is a great question because to be honest, I hadn’t thought about it before coming here. However, within the first week, I realized that the foreigner dynamic was going play a...

Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 ...