Aleze Goes To ...

a camel at Pink Lake, you could pay to ride them for 15 minutes So, I have had several adventures since I last wrote to report upon. The first is a trip that we took two weekends ago to the Pink Lake a little bit outside of Dakar.     On Saturday morning, we met up on the VDN, which is a large highway that runs through Dakar. After flagging down several cabs and having them laugh at us and drive away for asking to go to Pink Lake, we got a driver to agree to go for 10,000 CFA. Once we got out of the city, we realized why all of the other drivers had laughed at us. The dirt roads through the little towns we had to pass through were flooded and about an hour into our drive we found ourselves sitting on the side of the road next to our broken down cab. Luckily our driver was handy and he got the car back up and running and we reached Pink Lake about an hour later. The lake is pink because of the population of pink halophilic bacteria that live in its water, which...

Fatu (my host cousin) and me on Korite Sorry there hasn’t been a post in a while, but here’s a little update about what’s been going on in Dakar ☺     Last Friday was Korite, the celebration of the end of Ramadan. I think the name Korite is individual to Senegal and in most of the Muslim world this celebration is called Eid. For my host family, it basically consists of wearing nice clothes and eating a gigantic lunch. My host mother and cousins were up most of the night before Korite cooking and cleaning the house. I accidentally slept to late and missed the beginning of eating, which started early with a very sweet drink that was like very thin and very sweet peanut butter with cooked millet mixed in. As you can imagine, I was not too disappointed to have missed that. When I got up, my cousin Daba lent me one of her outfits, which was way to long for me, but I fit in. We spent the morning cooking and sitting in the backyard. My host parents friends all came ...

a baobab tree near the beach on the plateau in Dakar Here’s an account of my week of Orientation, Part 2.     Last week, the French pre-session ended and this week we had a second orientation with all of the new students. On Monday we spent the day in Yoff in northern Dakar talking about living in Dakar and eating wonderful tiéboudienne (pronounced chebba jen, I finally found the right spelling, it is rice, fish, root vegetables, and eggplant cooked in a spicy tomato sauce) and yassa poulet (chicken with onion sauce) and French fries. French fries are very popular here. Every sandwich I’ve eaten in Senegal, even the falafel, has had French fries in it.     On Tuesday, we went back to the Marche Sandaga (sorry for the misspelling in my second post) and went shopping for fabric. We took a car rapide to the marche. I spent the ride squished between a middle-aged woman and a very skinny little boy. It took twice as long as a cab ride, but it onl...

pirogues about to go to Ngor Island Sorry for such a long break between posts, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. Here’s an account of two little trips I have taken since I last posted. Enjoy and please comment! Sokone     We left for Sokone, a little town near the Gambian border, last Monday to work with the Cheikh Anta Diop University students on their “vacances citoyens.” Every year they go to rural towns and work in health clinics, teach computer skills and plant trees. After much waiting around on the first day (everyone keeps telling me that there is no concept of waiting in Africa, but it’s difficult to be patient), on our second day, we got up at 5am to eat with the students who were fasting for Ramadan and left at 7am to drive to the forest. The forest has very few trees, but the ground was covered in wild mint plants, which smelled amazing. We planted palm tree seeds. The boys dug the holes and the girls planted the seeds. This was a tiny demonst...

kids playing at the beach baby palm trees at the Radisson WARC (West African Research Center) where I take French rix au poisson at the WARC caf é     Salaam aleikum! This weekend I had a very typical Dakar experience. On Saturday we went to the marché Sandagar, a huge outdoor market where you can buy absolutely everything. I took a cab from my house to the marché and my cabdriver, when he saw that I was white, goes “America? Barak Obama!” It was a fun ride. When I got to the market I met up with some of the other kids from the program. They had been at the market for a bit and a guy had latched onto them. He followed us around the market, trying to get us to come to his stand and assuring us that the Senegalese do not eat white people. It made me feel much better ☺     After we left the marché we went to the Casino in the new mall on Corniche. The mall has a bunch of western stores but is not completely built, which is the case w...

A house inside a bunker in a military installation on the coast The president's house My room with mosquito net and other necessities of Senegal Fishing boats off the coast         Here is my first post about my adventures in Senegal.  Sorry for the lack of detail and compactness, I should be able to post more often soon.  Please comment and let me know what you think!     We arrived in Dakar really early on Monday morning. When we got off the airplane, it was immediately apparent that we were in a different country. The humidity is so high here that the air just surrounds and envelops you. I saw two kittens in the parking lot of the airport. There are animals everywhere here. We spent the first two nights in a hotel in Yoff, in northern Dakar, and I saw goats and puppies and horses pulling carts.      For my first meal in Dakar, we had rice and fish. The food is served on a big platte...