Senegal part 1

The trip to Senegal did happen. I know it's been almost three months since I've been home, but better late than never! The experience was neither good nor bad, just different. I'm glad I went, but I was ultimately disappointed in the end.

I was travelling with my friend Jerri from university. She was in my French class and coincidentally, we had both been exchange students in Helsingborg! She went in 95 and I was there in 99, but it is still neat nonetheless.

We met up at the airport. As we were checking in for our Paris flight, they gave us a heart attack. The plane was overbooked and they wanted us to take a later flight to London and then take a connecting flight to Paris. We protested. We already had to go from Paris to Lisbon to Dakar. We didn't want to take the chance of missing any of those flights! Luckily, there was room, so we settled in for the long flights ahead.

We arrived at Paris CDG and had to switch to Orly. I've never been to Orly before and was surprised how small it was. In preparation for Portugal, I changed into a skirt and tank top. We checked in and relaxed before our flight. While waiting in line to board the plane, they announced our names over the loudspeakers. Jerri went up to speak to them while I held our place in the line. Turns out they forgot to give us our bording passes. Luckily, everything was sorted and we arrived problem-free in Lisbon.

I had been to the Lisbon airport the December before, but I was a little sad this time. We wandered around, checked out the gift shop and wrote some postcards home. We headed outside to enjoy the Portuguese sunshine and were shown a thing or two about public displays of affection by a few overamorous Portuguese tweens. No wonder they were so thin: making out is an Olympic sport!

The airport itself was freezing. Little did we know that in a few hours, we would give anything to be back there!

We boarded the plane at 11:00 pm. It was a mixture of Senegalese, French tourists, a few Portuguese and two pasty white Canadians. We got settled in and tried to get some sleep before arriving. I drifted in and out of consciousness. Every little bump was an impending crash. I was afraid of falling asleep in case I needed to quickly escape. I had a window seat and I could tell we were flying over the coastline. Lights twinkled sporadically. By 2:00 am, we had arrived. We descended into the hot, wet, humid African night.