Been a while - Part Two

Now starting off on this post, is the Bank of Cameroon, you might say I am in the financial disctrict at the moment as you will see the next two or three pics below. Bank of Cameroon is one of the banks here, there is the Afribank, Standard something or another bank. As in most countries there are also a lot of credit/loan offices around. Most of them in this main street.


Now this is probably why I was referring to this part of town as the financial district. Here we have Douala's Stock Exchange, not as fancy as one would think a stock exchange would be and pretty small from the outside, no, I didn't get in, the stock exchanges are closed over the weekends and I doubt they will let me be snap happy in their building.


Now what is a financial district if there are no casino's, yes here we have a casino, one of many, even though I haven't been to one yet it doesn't seem that the casino's here are very busy. That or they only open at night and considering I haven't been around here at night. So I would assume even casino's thrive on a weak currency country.


And yes, it does seem that dot.com was here too, not sure if this is the same thing but found it pretty funny to see this run down building that is not in use with the dot.com sign on it. There are however a lot of these buildings around here, they do look run down and not in use but this is only from the outside. As you will see below ...


So here we see the inside of a stationary store, from the outside it did look a bit of a dump but then when you look or go inside it is pretty good and not run down at all. They have all the necessary stationary requirments and all you need to do is get your head around paying an amount of 350 CFA for a box of staples


Just another angle of the stationary store, needless to say I had to be very sneaky in taking the pics as when the cell phone comes out people actually stop and look at me almost like they know I want to take a darn pic and they are just ready to pounce at me to tell me that I am not allowed!!!


Now the next few pics are when I moved from the town centre to downtown, heading back home. Now during the day so far I have realized that there are a few things you need to know when in Cameroon. They speak French and here you stick out like a sore thumb, you can't even pretend to be a local. So you need to learn a few phrases like Bon Jour (good morning) - and excuse me if the spelling is not right. Bon Swaar (Good evening) Merci (thank you) beacoup (very much)au revoir (good bye)


And then the one thing I eventually found out was non merci (no thank you) and boy did I have to use that a lot. You will get bugged all the time to buy things and the more you say no thank you the more they bug you ... until you say non merci and then they back off pretty quickly.


There was this one guy however, I would tell him non merci all the time and he followed me everywhere trying to help me or sell me something and asking how he can help me so that I can give him money, so eventually sunglasses on and a few non merci's later I lost him. Walking around the shopping district is very interesting.