Continuing up the West coast of Africa on April 16, we were in Dakar, Senegal.  I went out for a walk with a fellow Canadian whom I had met in the airport in Montreal.  It wasn’t the kind of place I wanted to walk around, so I was glad to meet him at my door.  We took the shuttle to Independence Square and started to walk around it.  It was as bad as the market, but we didn’t want to engage a “guide”.  So we kept having to discourage them, one after the other.  At the far end of the square, we ducked into a bar and ordered a beer.  That kept the number of hawkers down, and got rid of the wanna be guides, for a bit.  The beer was really good:

And the blackboard graffiti better:

I could have posed for it:

On leaving the bar, we picked up another guide, like you pick up burrs in the bush.  He was going to take us to a big market, which ended up being his father’s store, a table on the sidewalk.  We wouldn’t have followed so docilly, had the route not being back in the direction of the bus, just on the back streets.

When we finally shook him, we found ourselves near La Galette – a French pastry shop.  I had to go in and see if they had a millefeuille and sure enough:

So I had one and they had Easter chocolates, too.  I bought some for everyone at the table.  Fish, a chicken, eggs, an egg, and a bell.  How strange.  No bunny rabbit.  In Senegal, he turned into a bell.

The Chamber Trio were on the World Stage and they were very good.

We were back in the Atlantic on April 17, Holy Thursday.  The ship has been taking small groups of us on a behind the scenes tour and today it was my turn.  I have done such things before on various ships but this was the first one that took us to the bridge, the Suites Only Lounge, the galley, laundry, the fridge, the freezer, the wine cellar, the engine control room, the marshalling area, the crew bar and mess. My favorite was the biodigester. 

It takes all the food scraps, but the bones, adds only water, and works like a giant stomach, until it turns out something that can be used in power generation.  The ship uses a lot of power.  Essentially, its diesel engines, just generate electricity and the electricity power everything from the propellers, to the lights, stoves, washing machines, etc. Fun tour.

Right after that, Daniel gave a good talk on Lanzarote.  I had been to Arricife, but only to the town, to sample the jamon, I had no idea the whole place was so interesting.  The Canaries are volcanic and they didn’t push up out of the sea all that long ago.  Until they had a desalination plant, life was seriously hard.  Daniel told us about the first settlers, and its iconic devil symbol, created by Cesar Manrique, an artist who returned to his native island, made it more beautiful, and fought for its environment. 

Christina Johnston, Coloratura Soprano, entertained us at night, with a very unique voice and personality.  She hasn’t been entertaining at sea all that long and is still thrilled with this new life of hers.  It was a lot of fun.

Still at sea on Good Friday, April 18, Daniel gave us an appreciation for the every many and varied people who had lived in Morocco, in sequence and in parallel.  There were the Amazigh or Berbers, the Arabs, the Jews and the French and, in the early part of the 20^th century, they were all living more or less in harmony.  After Morocco gained its independence from France in 1956, things went downhill in a hurry.  By the 70s, the Jews and the Christians had mostly left and it became a Musim state.  Agadir had a massive earthquake in 1960, and is not what it was.  Casablanca is more interesting.  Daniel’s talk was followed by Katie Chang, who enlightened us further on Cesar Manrique and his legacy on Lanzarote.  He was born in 1919, so was in time to be in the Spanish civil war under Franco.  He hated war, but was a good artist and ended up in NYC, making a name for himself.   He returned to Lanzarote after the 60s, when air travel was starting to cause a tourist boom.  He wanted Lanzarote to keep the cachet created by it’s unique, volcanic landscape, and fought hard against another row of beachfront high rises.  He succeeded in having it declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, with strict limits on the heights of buildings.  Quite a unique place.  We visit tomorrow.

We had Katie and her husband Mark for dinner and it was a hoot.  We liked them a lot.  Katie is a BBC and Mark figured that made him a BBB.

The repertory company did a thing they called Rock Britannia and we found it a tad disappointing because they did a load of songs we didn’t know, by a bunch of rock stars that we very much did know.  Old farts aren’t hard to please.  We like some old, same old, as long as it was good old.