Auld Lang Syne

New Years in St. Louis. This place was awesome! I am however getting ahead of myself, I'll start at the beginning.

Kaedi to NKT = 6.5 ish hour car ride. Its all in all not so bad but if you are going to be in a car that long it will be a task. We were home for 2 days with Marta and Aly it was a good time, we finally visited the river in Kaedi (took some pictures that I have ambitions of putting up soonish) We met up with Nema and 2 of her friends from 'Merica and did some fun going to another country stuff. Changing money, this was sweet. We go up early went to the place I thought was where you go to find that it was not open yet... I was 2 blocks in the wrong direction and felt silly for being as wrong as I was. When we finally get to the right place we know basically UM (ouguiya {ooh-gee-ah, thats the $ here) to CFA (Seneglase $ called say-fa) is life a 1 : 2 ratio where you get twice as many CFA for your UM. Nema being our hero and second year volunteer with mad language skills starts asking to trade money. The shops are not being very nice and they are offering us 1/5th of what we should be getting. This frustration is too much, we become indignant and storm off only to grab a Mauritanian friend to solve our problem. He goes and finds someone they say the same thing, but its correct. Problem was there is some out dated conversion method where you quote the money changing to be multiplied by 5 and we feel silly again. Thats solved and the group of us (7) cross the river without any problem and only sorta legally we just hop on a boat and go across, everyone does it. From there we ride about 8 hours in a series of buses to get to St. Louis.

This place was awe inspiring, there are 2 branches of a river that meet at the Atlantic making an island. This used to be the France's imperial capital of West Africa. The experience was like being on a real vacation and the details are hazy. We spent hours on the beach and felt like tourists. We rang in the new year in good spirits and good health.