Hotel Le Lagon 2 Dakar

... not hours, and it is wonderful. For those who don't know Julie and Kareem, I can tell you that there are few places outside of DC where I would feel more at home than in their home anywhere in the world. Julie and I first became friends by crying about our homesickness and the difficulty of school during our first year at Georgetown (she would go on to be valedictorian of the School of Foreign Service), and we lived together during our second year ...

... every now and again to the playing fields to see our teams clean up the competition.  I tried my luck at surfing, but of course the wind turned the ocean into a bunch of chop.  Fair enough, I found plenty of other ways to occupy my time...like beer and live music!  We were staying all over the city, but we all managed to meet up in the evenings for some fun parties.  Towards the end, my brain started to scrabble ...

... about Islam before dinner and heard a lot of the same information I have been hearing in class. Later on in the night I attended the explorer's seminar. We watched the movie "Cocaine Cowboys" which depicted the rise and fall of the cocaine wars in the 70's and 80's. One of the most interesting things I found out in the movie was that in the early 80's Castro sent boatloads of people that he thought were unfit for Cuba to the US. The movie was very ...

... repairman if it was ok to plug in my laptop adapter into a certain outlet(the outlets still looked odd to me, I tried to show him that my adapter is 120-240V). He didn't understand english, and just shoved it in the outlet, and I was like 'oh my gosh, it could have started a fire' Luckliy it worked. But after that, he saw the deadbolt lock on my door. He noticed it was loose and came back to fix it. Then he gave back AGAIN with ...

... chemins de fer et l'embarcadère pour Gorée et ailleurs. C'est tout. D'un côte et d'autre de la péninsule il y a une île, à gauche c'est Gorée et à droite la Madeleine.... Putain allez consulter le Lonely Planet, cette description ne sert à rien, disons juste que j'ai bien aimé cette ville et j'ai trouvé très chouette le service des « Sister Taxi », des petites voitures jaunes où tous les chauffeurs sont des femmes. Le Sénégal traverse une période difficile, lui aussi ...

... a friend. When she got back she asked me if I would like to join them for lunch but I was not feeling up to it so I just asked her to pick me up some bread and cheese on her way back. She came back dropped off my food and was pretty much strihgt out the door again to meet up with her Senegalese boyfriend. By this time I am really starting to feel horrible and can barely muster the engery to get out of bed. By the time ...

... the people seemed extremely happy. When we first arrived at the school, we were greeted with kind words, hand shakes, and kisses (yes, they kiss here). We then made our way through a very dirty alley and in through a concrete open doorway. There was the school. The kids were in class and so we had to remain quiet as we observed. They were extremely well behaved. Idrissa Fall, the director of the school, took us on a tour around the school while classes finished ...

After checking the BMI website to find that the flight was delayed, we then got a phone call from Jan and Dave saying "where the **** are you?" The flight had landed on time and they were standing outside the airport getting bitten to death by the bugs! We made up for being late by serving them chilled champagne in their hotel room then dinner at Lagon I with the waves of the Atlantic crashing beneath us. Just about to pack up the cars and then a day of ...

It has been a while since my last entry and so much has happened. There were two more holidays celebrated. One involving girls dressing as boys and boys dressed as girls with ash painted on their faces. Home made drums were fashioned out of tomato cans and plastic and kids went compound to compound collecting not candy or money but a much healthier option: cheery, or millet. Tom Harit was a very fun holiday and we all ate lots of millet with ...

... at one extroverted lady's instigation. Bunuel's Subida al Cielo (Mexican Bus Ride) has got nothing on this. Then there were the endless expanses of baobab trees, looking nothing so much like little African baby dolls rising from the landscape with thick trunks gradually tapering to tufted hair and stubby limbs. It was like a dream and a nightmare handing off the baton through the night. When the train finally rolled into the ...