hi! this is an old journal entry - I had forgotten to give it a title so I guess it didn't go up on the web! and I just realized it. oh well! it's from just after my first week here

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Well, Senegal just lost to Nigeria so they're out of the African Cup now. I love soccer, and I'm glad they watch it all the time here. I also love the bougainvillea that is blooming EVERYWHERE all over Dakar! I had thought it always had pink flowers but here it comes in all sorts of colors - yellows and fuschias and scarlets and peach and pink and it is beautiful. Another thing I like is the snack Anthone sends the maid out to get sometimes - they're these fried little pastry envelopes, like samosas, only filled with fish and I don't know what else, and you dip them in this spicy red pepper sauce. yum!! I also love my bed. The mattress is this big rectangle of foam and since the first night there has been this perfect little Christina-shaped well in the foam. It is way comfy.
Also I have never seen so many first-class smiles in my life. Senegalese people have these really great, beaming, friendly smiles and they smile all the time. (I realize this is a gross generalization but that is my impression so far.)
The way families eat lunch and dinner here is gathered around this big platter of food, and everyone just eats the section closest to them. The meal is usually some sort of grain like rice or couscous, with a sauce on top, and the fish or veggies or meat or whatever in the middle. Well, the other night, Antone's brother came over for dinner with his wife and 3 year old son (people come visit all the time, I am doing mental gymnastics to try and keep them all straight). Anyway, that night, dinner was mashed potatoes with this brown onion sauce (by the way, they eat loads of onions here but luckily they're usually cooked long enough to get the nasty onion taste out). So, there we all are, eating this mashed potato dinner, and the little boy wants to be fed some of the mashed potatoes, only he thinks it's fufu, (which is made out of plantain flour and looks a lot like mashed pototoes). But he couldn't pronounce the "f" sound correctly, so there he is, pointing to the platter of food and saying "poo poo, poo poo!" What made this REALLY funny is that there was a big pile of this sausagey type stuff in the middle of the dinner strongly resembling a big pile of turds. Of course "poo poo" isn't a Senegalese word so the family didn't see the hilarity of the situation. But man, it was so funny!

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