Driving Tour of Dakar and Djembe Lesson

This past Sunday my new friends Marwa and Debbie and I all went on a driving tour of Dakar.  I took 130 pictures and I can't even begin to remember everything we saw, but here is a nice selection of pictures and I will attempt to add some captions.

Dakar

Palm tree

Debbie and Marwa in the taxi

I believe this was the front of the US Embassy... but I could be wrong...

US Embassy

Les Almadies.  Beautiful beaches.

Boats to rent

Marwa, Ali and Me at Les Almadies.

No idea where we were, but there were big beautiful birds here.  Our "tour guide" Ali would just be like "ok! take pictures here, there are birds!" Haha

Peacocks! I ran from the taxi when I saw them to get these pictures haha.

Ok so this was some kind of African art museum.  The pieces are from all over Africa, but mostly from West Africa.  It was very beautiful and hard to capture on camera.  

Statues getting married

All made from one piece of whatever it was made of... amazing.

These next few are views from Phare des Mamelles - The lighthouse of the boobs...

The monument from afar

So beautiful... the end of that jetty(?) is the Western-most point of the African continent.

Marwa and I taking a tourist picture behind Phare des Mamelles

Marwa, Debbie, and Me

So this is an extremely large monument built by the former President Abdoulaye Wade.  It is seriously gigantic, it stands out clearly when you are landing at the airport in Dakar.  

Halfway up the stairs there's a little bench and viewpoint overlooking this cool African continent thing...

The African Renaissance Monument is pretty controversial and locals will kind of roll their eyes when they talk about it.  They know as a tourist it's cool to see, but with the terrible road conditions, sewer system issues, and never ending list of other problems in the country it's pretty hard to justify spending so much money on this... I've also heard it was built by North Koreans... 

Message posted at the base

View of the smog from the top

Debbie, Marwa, and Me at the base

Mosque and fishing boats and beach. Beautiful.

Don't quite know what this is but it looked cool.  Feel free to look it up and educate me... 

Museum that we didn't have time to go in

So when we got to President Macky Sall's house... like the White House in the US... we had to stand back for a minute because there was a changing of the guards.  Pretty cool to watch.

Senegal's White House.... Ali said that when the small flag is up under the big flag it means the president is there.  Interesting...

Marwa and the guard.  I did my little Wolof greeting with him and he said I should come back when his shift was over haha.  

This was some kind of government building...

This is a Baobab tree that is, again, according to Ali, over 350 years old.  It was massive and shady and great.

So after our tour we took 2 hours of drumming lessons.

The lessons were in the back of this sociocultural center in the beautiful garden.  

Drums in the process of being made by Ibou.

The garden.

Meet Ibou.

Marwa and Debbie resting.  I don't think they loved it as much as I did...