close but no keur moussa

Sunday morning our group woke up bright and early to go visit the monastery with the goat cheese and gregorion chants I mentioned last time.  Cisco woke up to walk us to the place we needed to catch bus 71 headed out of town. The ticket there and back only cost about 1 dollar for each of us, and the bus ride took about an hour. When we arrived, we were confused to see that we were in a bustling town, not the isolated rural setting the travel books described. After asking a few locals where we could find the monastery, we were directed approximately 100m down the road, where a large church was located. The chirch looked more like a barn than anything else: a huge open space surrounded by cement walls, and birds flying in and out of the rafters. We quietly entered, took our seats in the back of the room, and waited for mass to start-

I just smashed an albino cockroach that scurried under our table with my flip flop.  Ew.

So, yes, we attended a Catholic mass, and Ellen even took communion.  After the end of the mass, we looked around for the renowned goat cheese, but didn't find anything.  If this was a monastery, I had no idea where the monks lived, or why this would be a desirable destination for travellers. It was interesting to visit and see mass conducted with no hymnal books, and with "stained glass" windows that looked more like they were plain glass colored in with Crayola markers.  The music they played was beautiful, lots of drums and the cora (a guitar-like instrument, except bigger and with many more strings), but we didn't hear any Gregorian chants- the singing was just like any other Catholic choir I've heard before.

Turns out there is another suburb of Dakar nowhere near the monastery that is called Keur Massar (the monastery is Keur Moussa), and that's where we ended up.

What happened is I asked my host brothers where I could catch the bus to Keur Moussa, but they insisted that I meant to say Keur Massar. And because I didn't know any better, I assumed that I had read the guide book wrong. I mean, how many Keur M..ss.. places are there near Dakar? Lesson learned- never assume something is self-evident when it comes to travelling.

All in all, it was a pretty cheap lesson that only took up one Sunday morning, and was still something worth seeing.  (Did I mention on the bus ride back, we saw a group of people stuffing a live sheep into the trunk of a taxi to transport it?)  Don't worry, we're not giving up, and are going to try again when we return from Saint Louis.