Out and About

My classes on Friday were condensed so that they ended at 3pm instead of 5pm. It was nice, because it gave me time to get work done and time to hang out with some other students whose last day at the center was Friday. One guy is returning home to the states. The others are moving to St. Louis (Senegal) for a month, so they'll be back towards the end of October. I'll probably go and visit them as well, since I'll at least have a free place to stay there for the next month.

Friday (last) night, I planned on going to the semi-finals game for Senegal with my host mom, Laila (girl from Denmark who lives with me), and an Irish girl named Sarah. We got there about an hour before the game started, and it was merely chaos. The line for tickets wrapped around the stadium. And the line to get into the stadium wrapped around it as well. They kept selling tickets to anyone who would buy them, but the stadium was already basically full. There were police everywhere, and people were rushing in all directions, we had to hang onto each other to keep from losing one another. I ran into one of my friends there and he had lost the two other girls he was with. He hung around by us for a bit, but then went in search of the girls. We decided it was hopeless, cause the lines were too long, and decided to return home to watch the game on television. We sat outside in our backyard drinking pop and eating chips and relaxing while we waited for the game to start, and also during part of the game. Two Senegalese friends of Laila's came to join us as well. Soon after the game started, my host mom started yelling my name really loudly, it turns out that the friend of mine who had lost the other two girls at the game was on tv at the game with the two other girls. I missed it, but my host mom said they were the only tubabs (white people) in the stadium, and were cheering wildly for Senegal. Senegal won, again, of course.

The power went off soon after the game ended. It was difficult to decide what we could do with our evening. Since it is Ramadan, all of the clubs and restaurants with music are closed or at least don't have music. So we ended up going to a random bar/restaurant downtown. Since it's Ramadan, not many Senegalese were out. So the bar was at least half full with a random assortment of foreigners. One man had a handlebar mustache, and another had the shortest shorts I've seen a man wear in public in a very long time; as I said, quite the assortment of foreigners. Being inside the restaurant, even though we were speaking a mixture of French and English, we could've easily been in a bar in the United States or elsewhere. That was until merchants started standing outside the window next to our table holding up merchandise that they were trying to sell to us. Laila and I call moments like that: "Oh yeah, I'm in Senegal" moments. One of the Senegalese friends who we were with is studying American civilization at the university here and so he began a lot of conversations about the United States with me so that he could find out more about what he was asking. He asked me who Uncle Sam was. I don't think I've ever been asked that question before, and I didn't know what to say right away. I put an explanation together about how he's basically a patriotic symbol of the United States. The Senegalese guys could hardly believe that he was a fictional and not a real man. Laila said she thought there was a book about him called "Uncle Sam's Cottage." We quickly straightened out that she was in fact getting Uncle Sam confused with Uncle Tom's Cabin. Which led one of the Senegalese guys to start a conversation about how fascinating that book is.

One of the things I like best about the Senegalese is that they're so open to talk about everything. They freely talk about things that are very personal. They really do not hold back and there is no topic that is off limits, but even if they disagree with you, they are very respectful. At the bar/restaurant we also talked a bit about the religious differences between Senegal and the United States, which there are many. It's fascinating to hear them talk about the role Islam plays in the daily life of their country. I will get into that more in another entry, this one will be long enough as it is.

Today, I went to the Isle d'Ngor with Laila and Sarah. It's about a 20 minute taxi ride from here ($3). After we arrived at Ngor, we paid $1 to take a boat to the island. It was a long skinny boat with a motor. The island "streets" are paths about five feet in width with 7 foot cement walls on either side that are filled with graffiti and beautiful (real) flowers. I felt like I was a little kid going on an adventure as I made my way about the island, somehow I was designated as the leader since at one point in my life I was a Girl Scout. The beach was wonderful and the water felt delightfully cool in the incredible heat. We rented some umbrellas and beach mats and made ourselves comfortable when there was still hardly anyone on the beach. By the time we left at 5:30pm, there were a lot of people there. To get back to the shore, we were crammed on the boat with at least 25 other people. We couldn’t all sit properly (don't worry, they gave us all life jackets), but it was an incredibly amusing experience. The boat ride was only about 4 minutes long and the water never really gets very deep in that area. The boats, like the car rapides and many of the taxis, are run by the Muslim Brotherhood.