On October 15th, some friends and I went to Porto Novo for the day. Porto Novo is the capital of Benin but is not the main city of the country. Porto Novo has the more "culture and arts" in comparison to Cotonou but all the main business is done in Cotonou.
When we arrived it was a dramatic difference from Cotonou. The streets weren't as crowded. There wasn't as much pollution and there were a lot fewer new/modern buildings. It was nice to be out of the noisy city.
We went to a museum which use to be an old palace of some lineage of kings. There are a lot of kings still present in Benin even though the government here is a democracy.
The museum here is nothing like back home. It is pretty much the old palace with some random "artifacts" that aren't well kept up. It was interesting to see where the kings lived and had all their 41 wives. Furthermore, all the kings were buried in the palace as well.
Afterwards we walked to the botanical gardens, where we had lunch. The lunch was actually very good. I had a chicken sandwich which was fresh with onions and other vegetables. It was a nice change of pace from the food on the ship. The botanical garden was very simple, mostly trees with some labels. Some the trees were very impressive, I have no idea what they are called and I have never seen them before. Also in the botanical gardens there were monkeys! We had bought bananas beforehand so we fed them to the monkeys, it was great to be so close to them! They were very friendly.
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