Classes tomorrow!

I've heard rumors today that the strike is finally over! So classes start tomorrow, which is really exciting, relieving, and slightly stressful because I am slightly confused about the meeting time and place of several of my classes.  Oh well, whenever I can't find a class I just take it as a sign that I shouldn't be in it anyways.  Faulty logic?

Picking up where I left off last week, my roommate finally moved in Thursday night.  She is really awesome, and in my personal opinion, I have the best roommate of all the Americans here.  I say that because I like to brag, but also because my roommate is really friendly and social.  From what I hear, the other girls practically have to force their roommates to talk, and their roommates seem completely comfortable with one or two word responses.  In contrast, the moment my roommate (Juliette) comes in the room, she starts talking about anything and everything.  Frankly, I love that, because most women here don't talk much to me.  Juliette is a third year student in the Geographie department, she's also Catholic, which makes her part of a minority her on campus and in Senegal, and her father is from Cape Verde? so she speaks French better than Wolof.  Although, her French is extremely fast and I find her challenging to keep up with most of the time.

Besides hanging out with my roommate a little, I've been fairly occupied with this little church choir.  Little might be a bit of an understatement, because on Friday at our first rehearsal there were four people, including myself and Carlie (one of the other Americans).  Friday was slightly awkward as I was teaching the other two people songs in english and wondering why one the Senegalese girl there was asking if I had an arrangement for multiple parts.  We had our second rehearsal on Sunday, and there were about 6 other people there besides Carlie and I, three of whom are students at my University and are really good singers.  It appears that we could actually sound like a pretty good choir, I just need to be able to keep a straight face when the women singing the same part of me sings, "Open the eyes of my fart" instead of "open the eyes of my heart." I'm sure that what I'm saying when we sing in French is pretty far off too, but nonetheless, fairly amusing.  After a few choir rehearsals, I feel like I'm finally meeting making some quality friends, so that's definitely a nice feeling. 

Outside of choir rehearsal last weekend, I spent a little time in town bumming around a small little "grocery like store" where I found a jar of what the Senegalese refer to as peanut butter.  After trying said peanut butter I beg to differ, it just tastes kind of gross and is extremely liquid.  Maybe they gross peanut smoothie, I'll suggest my new name for their product.  In addition to visiting the downtown area, I hung out with some guys that Carlie met during dinner one night, and Carlie and I beat them in several rounds of scrabble (some in French, some not...).  The scrabble players are definitely a fun group of people. Campus here is divided into different villages, I live in village g, and I think there are villages from a to k or l.  Village A is an all male village, also home to the scrabble players, and is much livelier than the village I live in.  When I was over there, there were guys running around playing soccer, doing pushups, praying, blasting music, and being kind of crazy.  As of late, the excitement in my village occurs when one of the numerous cats jumps out of the bushes at me when I'm not expecting it and I scream.

Monday I had my usual french class, choir rehearsal (ok, so it's not really everyday), and then the other Americans and I went over to Baydalleye's house for dinner.  Baydalleye is the professor in charge of our program here as well as the head of the English department and the dean of the letters and sciences college.  Dinner was really fun because we don't get to see Baydallaye too often because he's so busy, and the food was a billion times better than what we eat on campus.  Yesterday after French classes Carlie and I trekked all over Saint-Louis with the rest of our choir to meet the tailor who is making our choir uniforms.  Yes, we are apparently wearing matching outfits during our concert, which is on December 6th, I expect you all to attend...  The tailor experience was interesting because we went fairly deep into the marketplace and down a row of what looks like storage garages, but are actually individual tailor shops with probably 50 people working on different garments.  Honestly, it felt kind of like a sweatshop because of how many people were crowded in such a small place.  

Today I had my first Wolof test, hopefully it went alright, I studied a pretty good amount of time for it, which I think amused my roommate who doesn't seem to do much studying.   The rest of the week I'll be trying to figure out classes, and then this weekend we're traveling to Touba, which is the site of the grand mosque here in Senegal.  

In reference to my previous blog, I said that people can be fairly assertive when buying things from shops on campus and in town.  I hate to say that they are rude, because that is my view of how they act from the perspective of someone from a culture very different, but I do spend a lot of time standing there looking kind of silly.  We'll see if I grow a little backbone!