Concert on the beach

Shopping and the Beach

Sunday was a long day of shopping and walking around the beach. Waking up, we headed towards downtown Libreville to visit several artisanal craft markets there. They were small groups of concrete stalls with roofs that overhung the narrow paths in-between. All around the low-rise markets there were gray apartment buildings reaching towards the sky, as well as the scattered bones of incomplete buildings. Wandering the paths of the markets, Zoe, along with new friends Allan and Jeff, from ANGT, showed us the items easiest to identify as authentically Gabonese and gave us lessons in bartering for things we wanted. The act of bartering was such a foreign concept when coming from the day-to-day in America, where goods always have an exact price. Still, most of us ended up finding something nice to bring home, a few emerging as natural-born barterers, especially Claire, who even enjoyed the game of give-and-take!

Map of masks of Gabon

Map of masks of Gabon we were shown in the market

After several hours of bartering in the markets, we decided to search for lunch. Our first attempts to try and find a place in downtown Libreville ended in failure, as places were closing early for Sunday. However, we thought that the beach would be full of places still open, so we hopped in cabs and headed that way. Upon arrival, we first had to make our way across the busy, wide boulevard that follows the beach; making it to the other side, we found a nice beach-side restaurant (“restaurant” is generous, it was almost more of a hut or shack). When we finally got around to ordering, a few of us thought that it’d be a good idea to get fresh fish, seeing as we were eating right next to the ocean. Little did we know how much the rest of the group would end up regretting we made that decision.

Crowd around the DJ at the beach

Concert on the beach

It ended up being at least an hour before our fish (and the rest of the food) arrived at the table. Everyone was famished and everyone else gave us bad looks. On the plus side, though, it gave us plenty of time to wander around the beach. Claire and I wandered across the beach, through a football game or two, a rugby game, and towards a big concert and pavilion. Along the way we ran into Andi, who was dribbling a ball around on the sidewalk near the beach. We ended up chatting with him about random things like what his favorite team was (Milan), and playing football on the beach, eventually even having Pip and Naomi join in!

the fish that held up our lunch

The offending fish dish

Lunch was quite delicious, with lots of sharing of food between everyone at the table. There was even passing food to each other at the end of the long skewers that had been delivered with some of our dishes. There was just one last place to visit before the end of our last free day in Libreville. After asking questions of several restaurant staff and talking with taxi drivers, Zoe finally got an idea of how to make our way (by taxi of course) to one of the few remaining major vernacular structures in the city, Eglise Saint-Michel, the city’s cathedral atop a hill overlooking Libreville and the ocean.

Eglise Saint-Michel

Eglise Saint-Michel, the cathedral of Libreville

The church was quite unassuming in basic form, being a large barn very similar to the churches where Dominicans and Fransicans would give sermons in in Europe. It was the details that impressed: each one of the 31 main columns were carved with biblical scenes, and the walls weren’t solid, but instead more of a screen which allowed for circulation of air through the building.

By this time, we were all plenty hungry for dinner. After taking the taxi down winding streets back to the hotel for a quick stop, we were off again. This time we headed for an Italian restaurant along the waterfront in one of the more industrial parts of town. Interestingly enough, upon entering this part of town, all of our taxi drivers took their taxi signs down off of the roof of their cars, telling us something vague about having to avoid the police (most of the taxis in Gabon aren’t quite legal). We then spent what seemed like quite a long time winding between desolate warehouses before finally reaching the restaurant, where we were beckoned out into a dining room atop a pier above the water.

Once there we spent a long and sometimes sleepy dinner taking one last breath of calm and freedom before the hectic days ahead. It was a bit surreal eating penne all’arabiatta and sipping limoncello while in the humid heat of a Libreville night.