Countdown begins

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So believe it or not...i choose not because it makes me too sad...i have exactly 5 weeks left in Senegal starting today. I can't believe the semester flew by so fast, I feel like I've hardly been here at all. I finally feel like I've found a place in the routine of life here -- everyday i speak more and more wolof and I explore a little more of the city and come to know it a little bit better. there's still a lot of things that i want to do -- will do -- before i leave, namely travel up to St. Louis in the northern part of the country. I think we might be trying to plan it for not this coming weekend but next weekend. We'll see.

So I have yet to start my internship; I was supposed to start tuesday...didn't happen, wednesday was a holiday (Toussant -- day to honor the dead), and yesterday it didn't happen either. I'm sitting at WARC right now, where I took my classes, and am waiting for the profs to arrive that are supposedly organizing everything. Hopefully I'll go in today...we'll see. Apparently the NGO i'm working for (OIM-Office of International Migration), is connected to the UN and, therefore, requires much preparation and documentation in order to intern. Hmmm...I guess I'll find out soon enough. But in the meantime I've had quite a nice little vacation...

This past weekend there was a soiree on Saturday night, which started at about 1:00 in the morning. People get going late here, I think I might have already mentioned that. One of our friends (actually our dance teacher) helped organize it so we got individual invitations. it was fun, i guess, if you like feeling like a rabbit in a cage of wolves. I swear the male to female ratio felt like it was about 58 to 1, and between us 8 girls we were swatting them off like flys. It was definitely an experience. Good thing we had our dance teacher and his friends there to rescue us...they always make sure we are having a good time.

On Monday I learned how to cook ceebujen which is the national dish -- rice, fish, vegetables and lots of oil. The maid and I have gotten to be good friends over the past week because often it's only me and her at home. So she's been giving me cooking lessons. Everyone says that by the end of my stay here I'm going to have to try and cook it all by myself...I'm not so sure that's a good idea. I don't think I inherited my dad's skills in the kitchen. But in any case I do want to introduce them to a unique and easy american dish, not speghetti because they've already tried that with another american student, so if anyone has any ideas, send em this way.

Then on wednesday 3 of my friends (from school) and I went to the beach...finally! There's a little island off the Northern coast of the peninsula that is Dakar called Ngor that you can take a pirogue to for only 500 cfa or about $1. It was absolutely beautiful, there was a nice are to swim with no trash, the beach was relatively empty and even though there were constantly vendors coming up and trying to sell things, they were very nice and weren't very pushy like some other ones we've encountered. The process of traveling to Ngor was probably more eventful then the actual island itself. I had to first walk to my friend's house, she lives about 15 mins away. Then we met up with 2 of our other friends and got some food at a gas station to make a lunch on the island. Then the interesting part...we had to hail a car rapide to take us the 6 or 7 miles up the road to get to the beach were we take the boat. I'll post a picture of a car rapide once I figure out how to download pictures...which I promised my parents I would try to do this week. But in any case these car rapides are actually small buses and they are very colorfully painted with lots of pictures and words all over. You have to hiss to get them to stop then you get in through the back of the bus, the "apprenti", who is not the driver but the one that hangs out the back of the bus and gets people to come on the bus and who also bangs on the side in order to tell the driver to stop and to go. He comes and collects whatever you owe them which depends on where you're going, and in order to get them to stop you either bang on the side of the bus, hiss, or yell at the apprenti to stop. It's quite noisy and there's always a lot of movement, but it's actually really fun. One time when I was getting on i climbed up the steps to get in and had barely stepped inside when he started banging on the side of the bus and the driver began to drive away...i definitely almost fell out of the back of the bus, which would have been quite a story. Lukily I managed to hang onto one of the seats and not fall out the back.

So in any case, we eventually got to the beach and rode the pirogue over to the island and had a wonderful day at the beach. I think this weekend we might try and go to Goree again, which is where we went the first week we were in Dakar, but this time we will probably just go to the beach and not take a tour.

Oh another quick thing before I end this exceedingly long entry...so i know that i've said this before but on a day to day basis, i usually have no idea really what's going on in my house, i mean people come and go and i really don't know why or where they are going unless they take the time to tell me or unless i ask. but i don't ask all that often because if i asked evertime i didn't know what was happening i'd be asking questions every minute, which i'm sure would get irritating for them. i've just come to terms with the fact that if it's important that i know what's going on, someone will tell me eventually. like the other day i walked in my kitchen to find a pig's head sitting in a pan on the floor. and when I say pig's head I mean the entire head -- snout, ears, tongue, brain, teeth, everything -- it was absolutely terrifying. Then our neighbor came and started hacking at it with a machete and after he had cut the ears off and the head in half at the jawline he stuck it in a pot and i have yet to see it again. Who knows maybe I ate it for dinner some night this week...i don't know because I never have any clue what's going on. Another example of never knowing pertinant information, my mother left last night for France for 3 months and I just found out last friday that she was even leaving in the first place. So she's gone, it was a little sad because I don't know I will ever see her again, but I guess she's been planning the trip since 2004 and it's just been put off and put off for several different reasons.

Ok...so I really should end here. Hope everything is going well!

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Comments

[zack]

a trip...
been to Morrocco yet? care to make a small trip that way to meet me and than back to your home in ALgeria? like...in one month? or is that too close to the end for you? otherwise I dont know if I will be seeing ya...still up north, in Latvia to be exact...