KO (Senegal)

I only have about 5 minutes before my gender and development class starts, which I love, btw, but its been a while since I posted, so I thought it was about time.

The weather changes a lot, you know it goes from about 20 celcius to 25, so I've got a pretty rough life going on. haha, sorry I just feel it necessary to rub my warmth in everyones faces. I spent Sunday at the beach with sally, which was great fun, we took our first unescorted car rapid ride. Car rapids are the ghetto version of Dakar public transportation, which as you can imagine is super crazy ghetto by normal standards. So there are guys hanging off the back of these old big vans that have no glass in the windows and just shout to people standing on the side of the road to tell them where the van is headed since they dont really have set routes. One stops for us and we ask if they are going to the plage (beach). They want to know which plage and we say that we don't care, any is fine. Keep in mind that this is pretty much all in wolof, since the people working on the vans arent the most educated, although neither sally nor i know the word for beach in wolof. They eventually decide we can get on, although we still arent sure if we will end up anywhere near the ocean. We keep trying to ask people if they will tell us when we are close to the beach and should get off, but they dont really understand either, until this nice women who actually speaks french helps us out. We get off the car rapid and can see the ocean, but we're pointed in a completely oppisite direction, so we just started heading that way. We passed a cool muslim cemetary that I wanted to go in, but i dont really know the rules on that so we looked from afar. from what i can gather, muslim tombstones all look like big marble/tile beds, ill have to take a picture at some point.

we eventually get to the beach and are relieved to find that it is a free beach as long as we dont sit under a little hut thing, which the guy working was very insistent that we do (for our safety of course, the 10 dollars shouldnt be an issue). we eventually got him to leave us, but i did gather about 10 phone numbers over the course of the afternoon.

and now it it past time to go to class. im on my way to st. louis this weekend, which will be very exciting. ive determined that ive gotten too used to dakar and it is time for a change. i love hearing about everyone elses adventures ,i cant believe mine is almost half over!
KO