Spring Break! (part one)

Okay, so I know a lot happened over spring break, I took several pictures and will have plenty of stories to tell and since I’m in the village now I don’t have regular internet access so you’ll just have to wait till I get back and tell you in person all of the wonderful adventures I’ve had. But here’s the basic breakdown:

First of all, there were eleven of us. On Saturday we took two sept-places up to St. Louis, which is right near the Mauritanian border. A sept-place was the recommended cheapest and easiest and most reliable way to get there. It is also “some guy with a station wagon.” You take a taxi to the garage (or, parking lot packed full of cars) where you’re immediately surrounded by men asking you where you’re going, offering cheap fares and trying to help with your bags. They walk alongside the taxi before you even open the door, of course very very friendly and helpful. Luckily Waly gave us the number of a friend who we could trust, and we called him saying we needed transportation north and he led us to two cars I don’t know how they were different from the others, it’d be 35 mille each, that’s roughly seventy dollars per car, which means we were five and six in a car and split the costs. Yes, five and six in a car. Think your average old used car, station wagon type, with an extra row of seats in the back. Then imagine six of us, one in the front seat, three in the middle and two in the back with some backpacks and a snack bag full of fruit, cookies, crackers, and fataya, of course. And now imagine that the windows don’t open all the way. And now imagine that the seats are covered in fake fur. Like, dark purple-almost-black fur. Like, the texture of perhaps the cookie monster if he hadn’t washed for a few months, complete with crumbs. And once you leave Dakar the temperature rises considerably, since there’s no more sea breezes. The drive took about six or seven hours.

The city of St. Louis, Senegal, is gorgeous. Reminds me of New Orleans, but smaller and no mardi gras beads. The buildings are all French colonial (keep in mind that “colonial” goes up to 1960 here) and it’s not as congested as Dakar. We spent three months in a lovely hotel with the restaurant overlooking the water. It was me and Kaela and Laura and Kelsey in one room, Tiana and Devyn and Kenta and Zawadi in the other- they were right next to each other so we had a nice patio type place to hang out outside all to ourselves! Britney’s mom and aunt flew in for a week too, and the three of them had a room on the other side of the hotel. And we noshed on fruit and bread and chocoleca spread and fresh coconut and sugar coated peanuts and laughing cow cheese, so we could split the cost of a hotel-restaurant fire-oven-cooked pizza or afford a glass of wine with dinner. And then we spent all day for three days shopping. I wish I were exaggerating. But it takes so much longer here to buy anything, and it’s fun! And we went in groups, so it’s not like I was spending money right and left. Not really.

Our first night at the hotel (“La Louisianne”, if anyone’s interested in going) the staff told us there was going to be a concert in the “lobby” around eight. Sure enough, we heard drums right around the corner and when we arrived saw a whole group of what turned out to be students from Lewis and Clark college from Portland, Oregon, sitting as audience. Small world. The musicians start drumming and there’s one dancer who has some “volunteers” aka he pulls us up one by one to learn different dances which I and a few LC students were loving but the folks in my group were having none of it, especially when they decided to teach us the “ventilateur” dance. Which means, dance like a ceiling fan. Which means put your hands on your knees and sort of hula-hoop your hips around, which resulted in the next three days one of the drummers seeing me on the street and shouting “hey jaay-fundé!” which had I not been on vacation would have been really annoying but honestly it takes a lot to annoy me these days. And besides, learning how to shake my jaay-fundé in front of a hotel full of toubabs and a group of overfriendly musicians would come in handy, as I have now found out. I had a hunch it would.

(If you’re wondering what “Jaay-Fondé” means, it’s kind of hard to explain. See, fondé is a kind of porridge made from millet that’s about the same texture as oatmeal, except instead of oats it’s like tapioca, and you eat it with sweetened condensed milk or sugar or vanilla yogurt or cream or in the case of my family all of the above. It’s pretty rich but I love it, we ate it every Sunday as a break from all the salty oily dinners we ate the rest of the week. So that’s fondé. “Jaay” means “to sell” in wolof. So a jaay-fondé literally means a porridge seller. That is not what someone means when they call you that. What they mean is that you’re carrying a lot of it with you, more specifically behind you. So if you’re sitting down what you’re sitting on is two huge sacks of porridge. Which is a good thing? The translations that come to mind are “bootylicious” or “badonkadonk”. Anthropologically speaking, of course.)

I also found a really cool store of nomad stuff. There was a wall of swords and the guy who was running the place knew the story behind each piece, which could easily be found in a museum, not in a shop just off tourist row. I came back at least three times to stare at the curved daggers and ornate silver designs.

From St. Louis we hired a minibus to take us to the bird park. It was a lovely little thing- bigger than the sept-places, and we all fit in one so it was cheaper. They picked us up right at the hotel and dropped us off at the next hotel, about three or four hours away. It was a bumpy ride. And dusty. Kelsey’s black jeans ended up brown. Luckily we packed our travel food in bags, because you could write your name twice in the layer of dust we picked up going down the dusty roads. The bus was rattling like it was gonna fall apart, and every so often we’d stop to check something to do with the engine that I chose not to worry about. Also, the doors were held on by rope. I love Africa.

The bird park was about an hour away from anything else except a tiny village and campement- we’d brought along plenty of food because we knew that the hotel would charge crazy prices for meals. Of course, we found out that they also required us to tell them a day in advance how many of us would be eating breakfast or dinner, and were very grumpy when we tried to change last-minute. It was worth it, though, for the POOL. I felt like such a tourist and didn’t care, woke up in the morning early so that the surly cleaning crew that was waiting outside could come and clean, and instead put on a swimsuit and fell asleep in a cushy pool chair under a huuuuge palm tree, then woke up and went for a swim, Britney’s family brought magazines that I’d never ever read at home but oh my goodness were they hot commodities to us. English! And in the afternoon we went to see us some megafauna.

(to be continued)