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Published: October 27th 2005
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Ngor Island
The view of N'Gor Island from N'gor Beach, on the mainland. October 26, 2005
The last few days have been exciting and eventful. We’ve had some major planning sessions and are finally booked for all of our travel dates. We’re going to leave Senegal January 4, and head to South Africa immediately. We were going to try to go to Europe with Marian and Alex, but their budget’s already spread thin, and we should really do our original traveling before adding on extra destinations. If, after South Africa and the safari, we still have any money, we may spend some time in Europe. As for right now, we’re set for all our Africa travels. We’re really excited, especially since we just spent the afternoon looking at all the places we can stop at on the way from Cape Town to Johannesburg. They look stunning. It’s also really nice that we’ll be in South Africa for the summer now, since it will probably be better weather! Marian and Alex are heading home from Dakar, so they are going to leave a little before us, and actually make it home for Christmas. We’re really jealous of that, but are also excited about the travel plans.
Anyway, after spending the day in bed on Saturday, feeling like we’d been hit by cars, we were up and ready to go on Sunday. We headed out to Ngor Island. There are three islands near Dakar, Goree (with the Slave House that we visited during the orientation), Ngor, and the Isle de Madeleine, which we hope to go to soon. Ngor Island is very popular with the tourists, and is where a lot of the holiday apartments are. We finally got a taxi to the beach on the mainland, after lots of trouble with the name of the island (as far as we can tell, we’re saying the EXACT same thing as the Senegalese, but when we say “Plage Ngor, s’il vous plait,” they look at us like we’re asking them to take us to Mars), plus no one actually wants to give the Tubabs a reasonable taxi fare. The taxi drivers even gang up on us, and after one offers a completely ridiculous fare, the rest chirp in that it’s the best we’ll find. So, we finally got a reasonable quote (which means we were most likely charged twice as much as we should have been), we headed out to the beach. From the mainland, the actually island is very close. You take a pirogue over (wooden boat with a motor on the back that probably fits 40 people, quite crammed) to the island and pick which of the two beaches you would like to be let off on. We didn’t realize that by picking one, it meant you were destined to spend the day on it, and after trying to walk over to the other beach, realized that we were stuck. It was really nice though, nice, clean sand and calm water. We ate lunch, and laid out on the beach. We swan a little, and had a really relaxing day. Ngor is nice because there aren’t really any vendors there, so you can just relax and enjoy the beach. The water is really clear here, almost tropical looking, especially if you can see past the trash. The holiday apartments are well-kept and very colourful and line the beach. After returning to the mainland we headed out for a familiar dinner before returning to Magueye’s house for a week of somewhat questionable food. Who knew you would ever pay $10 for a plate of pasta and be so extremely content with it.
This week we’ve been working on our French lessons again. This is our last full week of lessons, and it just may be that we’re actually improving. Our lessons, which take place on the roof of our instructor, Gora’s, house. John likes to call him Guru, or Gora the Explorer, although not to his face. We head over there at 9 am, and some mornings he doesn’t pop his head out of his bedroom until 9:30. He then has a shower to wake up before starting the lesson….oh how the Senegalese operate. Sometimes they make the sloth look like it’s moving like a leopard. Anyway, we were kind of disappointed with the lessons last week because they were focusing a lot on grammar and not enough on our oral skills. This week everything has changed. While earlier in the week Gora had some interesting monologues on the robotic nature of all people in the west and had some interesting (yet erroneous) opinions on suicide and drug use rates in North America, in the past couple of days we’ve really set him straight. We’ve had quite a few discussions on family life in the west, and even gave him quite the history lesson yesterday on why the southern US is a lot poorer than the north. Today we ventured into homosexuality in Senegal, and even talked about FGM here. We’re really pushing the borders, but at the same time, getting a lot of practice. Talking a lot about home is good, we can practice a lot more French than when he asks us incredibly loaded questions like, “what is your opinion on African immigration to the US”, or “what do you think of the lower status of women here in Senegal?” We’re a lot more comfortable talking about polar bears, the CN Tower and cottage life.
John and Alex just left to go play soccer on the beach with a few of the guys that we’ve met here. It’s funny to walk around the neighborhood, because even though we’ve been here for weeks, we’re still kind of like celebrities. The kids still point and yell “bonjour Tubab,” Yesterday we had about ten kids follow us home, holding our hands and asking us all kinds of questions in French and Wolof. Regardless of our answers, they giggled and pointed, but it was really cute. We’ve recently met two other Canadian sisters (from outside of Prince Albert, SK) who are staying with a different host family for a month. They were telling us last night that their first night at the house, all the kids keep poking their heads into their bedroom while they were getting dressed, and then yelling “yep, they’re really white ALL OVER” to each other in French. The host mother told the girls that the kids in the house had never seen “tubabs” before. Very amusing.
We’re hoping to head over to St Louis this weekend for some traveling and a little break from the food. It’s the colonial capital of Senegal, so the tubabs should fit in just fine. It’s supposed to be a really nice city, especially all the colonial French buildings. Unfortunately, they stopped running the train between Dakar and St Louis, and now we’re looking forward to a five hour (on a good day) drive in a run down taxi with no shocks. It will be nice to see it though, as we haven’t really been out of Dakar yet. We figured once we’ve moved into the apartment and are paying for it, we should spend our weekends in it, so we’re taking advantage of our last weekend at Magueye’s to go guilt-free! I’m sure we’ll have more to write after that adventure. Keep those emails coming!
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