hot hot hot cold

Well, the last few weeks have been kind of a blur, mainly because the weather has been so hot it melted my memories. Luckily, the last four days have done a 180 and now it's coldish. When the the weather is hot I spend most of the day trapped him my room, mainly because my roommate convinces me that it's too hot to leave until 4pm haha.

Lately though I've actually been pretty busy with school work, hence the lack of recent postings. It's really nearing in on my return home, and I have the usual mixed emotions about that. I have a feeling that i will have a different perspective on a lot of things, and I will really miss the people that I've gotten to know really well. More of what I've been up to though: last weekend was really crazy. The Catholic students put on basically a weekend long party full of concerts and food. I'm not really sure why they put on the party, but they apparently do so every two years. Luckily, my roommate was once again the head of the party planning committee, and our room turned into a battle field. Thursday while I was reading in my room, six men carrying giant sacs of I'm not really sure what burst into my room and left all this stuff on the floor. A few minutes later my roommate comes running in saying, "why did you let them bring the charcoal in our room?" I suppose her question is legitimate because I don't really care for charcoal to share my bedroom with me, but that was the kind of the interaction that I had with her all weekend. She would organize something crazy, lots of people would show up/never leave, and I would sit there slightly confused.

Friday was actually pretty fun because there was a relatively small group of girls in my room making the Senegalese version of donuts (quite tasty I might add). Hoping that the girls would accept my shallow act of friendship, I bought a big bottle of fanta to share, and they were all very nice to me afterwards. Juliette's friend Joe also kept turning up to "help" but I soon realized that he was really there to learn how to play the clarinet. It made me kind of sad to see that five minutes into the lesson he was practically as good as I am... Friday night I attended what turned out to be the Catholic variety show. The show featured three different choirs, a dance group, rappers, poets, and probably more acts after I left at 2 am. The dance group was led by my friend Jeff, and honestly, they were excellent dancers, but we all felt a little awkward because the girls in the dance group were dressed a little scandalously, even for American standards. Fortunately, there was a group of 5 nuns sitting front and center trying not to act like the girls were doing or wearing anything bizarre. Saturday the crew was back in my room all day making more donuts and other dishes. I kind of avoided the room as much as possible because there was just too much going on, and the people cutting onions were making my eyes burn. The festivities continued through Sunday evening because they put on some strange version of a carnival, which was mostly just everyone dancing and drinking. I find the Catholic culture strange here sometimes because the majority of the population is Muslim and does not drink alcohol.

The weekend before last was also slightly taken over by my roommate because of her choir concert. This was more of an official concert in town featuring the UGB choir and a choir from Dakar. Friday morning at 5am the choir from Dakar arrived and a really sweet Congolese student showed up in our room for the weekend. I spent that entire day at Ranch de bongo, aka the pool, trying to read a book but just getting sunburnt instead. That evening, Emily and I had dinner in town at this wonderful Moroccan restaurant that we frequent on kind of a sadly regular basis since we discovered it. After dinner we headed off to Juliette's awesome concert. The choir from our University was great, but the choir from Dakar was fantastic. Besides filling my time with my musically inclined friends, I've been working and hanging out. All of the girls from my program are finally back on campus together and it's been fun to be a group again. Tomorrow I have my final Wolof class with our oral final exam. Our teacher told us that if we don't get a 100% we can't go home so... Speaking of our Wolof teacher, I forgot to mention another reason why I've been so busy. Pape Laye the Wolof teacher recently completed an english/Wolof dictionary and I was editing it for him. Unfortunately, the editing process involved me italicizing by hand the 140 pages of his dictionary, two weeks later I am finished with that lovely task and slightly sick of the sight of my laptop.

Hopefully all is well back in the U.S., most of my friends are taking finals ha ha ha, just kidding!