Spring Break 09!

Hey ya'll,

It's been a while and I've got lots to catch up on. I think I left off about two weeks ago while I was finishing up my first semester here in Saint-Louis. I still have a few classes just kind of dragging along here from the last semester but I'm ok with that because I kind of created the courses for myself so it seems to be working out fine. We had one minor scare with regard to my history of Africa class because the grade for the class is based solely on a paper we wrote, but because the last few weeks were review and exam weeks for the political science classes, our history of Africa class never actually met. As Ariel and I were pondering how to turn our papers for the class in, one of the other girls on our program returned form her trip to southern Senegal to inform us that our Professor had moved to a different city, very far away, two days before and would not be returning. For the next 24hours I had some minor panic attacks until I stumbled across the solution to my problem in the form of said Professor walking down the hallway towards me. Haha, I was obviously in control of the situation, and our professor had obviously not moved to Timbuktou.

That weekend I wasnt really up to much, and Sunday I spent the day once again at Noa's house where I had the pleasure of trying pigeon. Unfortunately, my phobia of birds seems to extend to eating those varieties outside of the chicken and turkey families, so the pigeon was not my favorite meal so far. Noa's family was as entertaining as ever, and I got to meet a really cool girl studying applied math. At the moment, she's researching Malaria treatments and why/how certain medications that are working well suddenly stop helping. She had some fascinating things to share with me, and I told her that I thought her research was great because so much Malaria research goes on outside of the the regions that actually suffer from it, and I think that those living in the regions afflicted by Malaria have access to alot of useful information and they know the disease because they have suffered from it. Monday we packed up and headed out on our spring break adventure to the petite cote, a grouping of towns along the coast that are known for their beaches and tourists, or so I've decided.

My spring break trip was a huge learning experience for me. I'm not sure why it took so long for me to understand some of these things, but I think it had to do with not being so surprised by things anymore, and looking at them from a perspective of doing them from a more Senegalese view point. For example, traveling to each city was possible by various modes of transportation, ranging from private taxis to buses crowded full of people heading off to unknown final destinations. I learned quickly that if I said, "I want to go to this place," my options would be a taxi ride for $20, but if I said, "How do I get to this place?" then I could take a variety of vehicles for different prices. It took me the whole year to get the hang of it, but now I understand how to travel in Senegal without having to pretend to get in a fight with taxi drivers because they wont give me a good price, hooray!

Back to the begginning of the trip, we took a minibus down to Thies, a city outside of Dakar (where I spent my first month) with hopes of finding some other form of transportation to our final destination: Tubab Diallo. Learning experience number one occurred on the bus, be careful what you say, just because you're foreign doesn't mean people dont understand you. Sidenote, this seems incredibly obviuos to me, especially because almost everyday I encounter people who think that I dont understand what they're saying about me in French or Wolof, and they are wrong...But anyways, I still needed to learn this little lesson. I was sitting in the front row of four rows in this minibus formerly known as a van. Luckily, the two other girls I was traveling with, Ariel and Elise, got placed in the fourth row, so in order to communicate with them I had to call them on my cellphone. As I was making sure they were situated alright, I explained to Ariel that I was in the front row with three other people and two very young girls who happened to be eating bananas and then spitting the banana on me. About ten seconds after I hung up the phone, the women next to me said, "m'am, m"am, excuse me, where are you from?" We proceeded to have a great conversation through which I learned that she is Mauritanian but has spent the last eight years in Colorado and speaks english very well. Secretly though, I was wondering the whole time how she felt about me proclaiming to two random girls that her children were spitting bananas on me. Moral of the story, well theres a few of them, but mainly, dont give your kids bananas on a minibus, I would recommend oranges.

We escaped our minibus in Thies without real knowledge of how to continue along our journey, but we evenutally found a taxi who would takeus for $10 to our hotel a ways away. The taxi worked out really smoothly for me because it was a long drive out there, but the Taxi driver seemed to have given us a good price in hopes of wooing Ariel, so she was a little uncomfortable. Monday night we stayed in a great little hotel, one of the few in Senegal where you can share a room with four people, which I think is very interesting. Besides that, the hotel appears to be owned by a very sweet French women who makes a lot of effort to employ locals and use local resources. For example, next to the toilet was a sign that explained that the toilets are made locally so could we please dispose of our toilet paper in the trash can so as not to clog them. Apparently Tubab Diallo is not the
Kohler of Senegal, but they'll work on it. Later that evening Emily came to join us after her travels in Morocco, and we had dinner and hung out at the hotel.

- as an addendum to my stay in Tubab Diallo, Tubab is the Wolof word for a white person, and I was told Tuesday morning by a random man following me on the beach that Diallo is portuguese. Senegal was originally colonized by the Portuguese, and it appears that Tubab Diallo was a Portuguese tourist hot spot during the 17th century.

Tuesday morning we decided to move onto a different town because Tubab Diallo, although very cute and calm, was just a little too cute and calm. We hiked about a mile with our luggage after refusing an overpriced ride from the hotel driver, and found a taxi willing to take us to the next vehicule en route to the town of Somone. After the taxi we boarded a large van contraption that took us to another taxi station, who finally helped us get to Somone. According the guidebook, the things to check out in Somone are the bird lagoon along the coast and a creole restaurant. Unfortunately, the restaurant informed us that they are closed tuesdays (not normal) and we decided to first find a place to stay before touring the lagoon. The hunt for a place to stay turned into a strange adventure with the man from our pizza restaurant and a bunch of Senegalese people leading us through their homes and showing us random places we could stay. Eventually, we escaped our overly forceful tour guides and headed off to the heighboring town called Saly. In Saly, some very nice bartenders at the cheapest hotel listed in the guidebook informed us of a less expensive place to stay where we wouldn't be obliged to share twin beds. The place turned out pretty great, we had two person apartments with kitchens, air conditioned bedrooms, hot water, and living rooms for about $26 a night per room.
Saly housed us for the next three nights and gave us a perfect location to explore the rest of the towns that make up the petite cote.