Taxi

Yesterday I took a taxi by myself for the first time here. The other times I’ve either been with someone else or someone helped me. It all went really well; I got were I wanted to go. The exotic thing about the taxis are that you’re usually not alone in it (if you don’t count the driver). The taxi picks up people along the way. So it can happen that they refuse to take you, because the other ones in the taxi won’t go to the same place.

The second exotic thing is of course the price. 200 F CFA. Which is 0,3 €. If you wanna go a little further away, like to the other end of the town, it will cost 400 F CFA. But the prize is negociable. If you want to go to the other side of the river, i.e. you have to take the bridge, you need to go to the petit marché, then take a taxi from there to go over the bridge.

The third exotic thing is what to say when you, for example, want to go to my house or to IRD. To go to IRD you say CEG 6 (which is short for a school), première gao. Gao is a tree. Première means “the first”. This is the première gao (the one behind the other):

And to go to me you say CEG 6, deuxième gao. Which means the second gao. This is the second gao:


As you can see there is no tree here, because they took it down, but the direction is still valid.