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Published: June 10th 2006
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Our first home cooked dinner
Pasta. No...you are not seeing things. We have a waterfall room. Ok...not a real waterfall, but a couple of very fun murals. Reminds me of the old place on Euclid. :) It is definitely our coolest room (coolest meaning, it has a ceiling fan, so we don't bake in it!) I finally am getting closer to being ‘settled’ here in Dakar. We are fully moved into our new house and trying our best to adjust to our new way of life. On the outside, things are not all that different from home. We wake up, walk to work, spend 8+ hours in front of a computer, then go home. However for some reason almost every aspect of the day is quite a chore for us. Ok, maybe waking up is not all that difficult (except for the fact that I hate mornings). Our bedrooms have these shutters on them that are always closed, which is probably good because it keeps more of the mosquitos out, but bad because it stops any sun from shining in and therefore makes getting up that much harder.
In the big scheme of things we are very lucky. We have a house right by the office and SO FAR have been fortunate enough to have electricity which means that the air conditioners that are in our bedrooms work. Which is SO good, because the other 8 rooms in our house feel like a sauna. As mentioned before, our house is way too big for
Nicole and I in front of our house
It took 20 minutes to get Manamee (not sure of the name...or his role, we think he is guard #2) to figure out how to take a picture of us in front of the house. You can see that it didn't work out so well, but cracks me up nonetheless. 2 people. Even if Nicole and I scream, we can not hear each other when we are not in adjoining rooms. Now, Nicole and I thought that this house was just for the 2 of us, but we have discovered that it isn’t all apparently ours. Due to the fact that we can’t exactly communicate with anyone (note: still REALLY need French or Wolof lessons), we have a lot of questions about our house that we are a bit confused on:
1. Who owns the large, mean, and very loud dog that is tied to our house and enjoys barking at everyone and everything at all hours? Are we supposed to feed the thing?
2. We have a maid, Louise. We have figured out that she washes dishes, but other than that we are not sure what she does all day because we wouldn’t call the rest of the house ‘clean’. The one thing we do know, is that she showers every day before she leaves. We have 2 bathrooms, but she has taken over one of them. Her dirty clothes, etc. are always hanging around. So I guess that means we only have 1 bathroom?
3. We have a
Our living room #1
A view when you walk in the front door guard, Bouba. It appears Bouba has a lot of friends. So it seems like we have had 3-4 different guys hanging around. We are a bit curious…how many people actually have keys to our house? Also, it appears that someone lives in a secret room behind our (well Louise’s) bathroom. Is that where he lives? Now that it is World Cup time, someone is usually standing outside watching our TV. Sometimes we invite them in to join us, sometimes not…not sure of the etiquette on that one.
We are hoping to get these questions as well as many others answered just as soon as we can get one of our local friends to come home for lunch with us so we can actually communicate to Louise with more than sign language (because I can tell she is a very sweet lady). In the mean time, we are definitely still trying to learn the ins and outs of the house, as there are so many, but are slowly becoming more comfortable. We have also managed to do a bit of exploring around our neighborhood and have found that we should be able to walk to most anything we need, which
is key because trying to hail a taxi and communicate with them where we need to go as well as barter over the price of the fare is the biggest chore. Tonight we found a local supermarket that has chips and salsa! Definitely my best dinner thus far! Our house is near to a lot of the embassies so the store definitely has things catering more to us expats. Which I must say, I appreciate. At the same time, we need to start doing some more shopping in the local street markets because they are much cheaper. The problem with the local markets is you have to barter for everything which I hate to do when I can speak the language, even harder when you can’t. And of course, being white, we have an automatic ‘raise the price by 200%’ sticker on our heads.
So things are running fairly smoothly day to day here. As smooth as to be expected at least. Unfortunately, the bouts of sickness have begun. So far this week we have had to make a couple trips to the doctor, as both Agnes and Nicole were dealing with high fevers, etc., they were afraid that
it was Malaria, but turns out it was a form of a flu…so good news is they will be OK. So far I am just dealing with some cold like symptoms, which I think are all due to the pollution infested air we breathe daily. How do you get a cold when it is so hot? Isn’t that just a bit contradicting? While I am on the subject of hot…Megan’s shoes literally melted when she was walking to the store the other day. When I tell people it is hot out…I need to clarify it is Africa hot.
Many of you mention that I haven’t given any work updates. Usually people don’t want those…but here it goes. It is going good…well better than it was a month or so ago. We all are working on different things, and I was the lucky one chosen to come up with policies and procedures for the company to adopt accrual accounting. I know…to many of you it sounds awful, but it is something they definitely need to do to stay compliant, and something I know a bit about. Now rolling it out to the people working in each of the 48 country
mmmm...
Enjoying some watermelon that we bought from our taxi window. offices will be another interesting chore.
We did have yet another holiday this past Monday, so we took a trip up north to Saint Louis. That was an experience in itself that I will leave for my next blog as it is getting late and I am thinking I need to sleep off this cold thing I have going on.
More to come.
P.S. I am trying to be good and send out updates often (as long as I have things to say that is), but hello….what is going on with you? Give me updates on home!
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Amy
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Interesting....
Well Kristin if you wanted an interesting experience you are certainly getting one!!! It sounds great!!!