Backtracking Entry - Conakry Guinea, February 11th, 2008

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February 11, 2008

A day of meetings! It was a fun and interesting day. We were driven around Conakry by Paul, the driver. It is quite common to have a driver, especially in a rental vehicle. Another interesting aspect of driving around, there is a lot of horn honking. Honking usually is used to let people know you are coming so don’t cross the street or watch out, if they are walking along the road edge. There are people everywhere in Conakry. It is amazing the level of activity. People are so busy. The other neat thing about Conakry, is that it is on a peninsula, surrounded by ocean. It is wonderful. There are interesting looking fishing boats and people selling fresh fish along the side of the road. It is an amazing town, although traffic can be horrific! Sure glad I do not have to drive.

The first meeting of the day was at the Ceres Lab at the University of Conakry. We met Michele of CRC Sogema (a Montreal company). He comes over for 2 weeks each year. He gave us a tour of the lab, which was fascinating to see the organic and inorganic labs. We discovered that Michele is staying at the same hotel as us, as well as his work mates. Michele speaks English too, so it was nice to have him explain things in English to us. However, the lab managers spoke only French, so Chris, Aguibou, and Michel would take turns translating for me.

From the university, we went to the CPDM to visit Mr. Souma (a very familiar face!). Mr. Souma has been at PDAC the past couple of years, it was nice to see him at his office. We were lucky to have a tour of the mapping facilities!

Then we went to the real estate office to line up an office viewing tomorrow. After that, we lunched at Le Rocher and I had the most wonderful brochettes de capitaine (apparently capitaine has fresh water and ocean water varieties - it was explained that the fresh water can get to 1.5 metres and are like a carp, the sea variety are smaller and are like a barracuda).

After lunch, we met with the new lawyer for Cassidy/Navasota. Very nice man who seems to be very well informed. From there, we headed to the Transmar office (they look after a lot of our shipping). The office was quite nice, however, I noticed a mouse running down the blind cord. I kept my feet away from the bottom of the couch - who knew how many more might be running around! This office was nice to visit as the fellow could speak English and I could understand the conversations.

The next meeting was with Corrine at Eurocar, our truck rental agency. She spoke very quickly en francais.

The last meeting of the day was at the Total office (fuel). This meeting lasted almost an hour and was 95%!i(MISSING)n French, so I didn’t understand hardly a thing. I can understand one or two words, or small simple sentence (often fragments), but I cannot follow conversations yet. Hopefully, I will improve over the next few weeks!

Finally, we returned to the hotel and I had a nap, in fact, I slept for 2 hours. Got up and we decided not to go for dinner as neither one of us were very hungry, so we each had a power bar. I went back to bed and had a great sleep!

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