Classes are winding down, although they didn't finish nearly as early as they were supposed to, which is disappointing and stressful because it means that now we have to write final papers and keep going to class, which is a little much.
Last weekend I went to an island off the coast of Dakar saturday with a bunch of people on my program who had rented a house on the island for the night. I was planning on leaving later in the day to go home, but I ended up spending the night as well and having a lot of fun. The house even had a pool, which I thought was a little unneccessary since we were on an island surrounded by beach, but it was still a lot of fun. Then Sunday we did actually sit on the beach for a while before heading home in time for lunch and then going to a Senegalese wrestling match with one of our classes. That was a lot of fun to see in person ,we watch it on tv a lot. I didn't bring my camera because my host mom warned me about pick pockets, but this ended up being a smaller match than most of the other ones, so it probably would have been fine. There is a lot of preperation for each match, we saw for, with lots of different little ceremony type things that they do before hand to ensure good luck and that they win the match etc, but then each match actually only lasts for about a minute, but it is still a lot of fun. The crowd gets really into it.
Friday after my class I left for my rural visit, which was a lot of fun, but not all that rural. I went to a village called Diouffior, which is about 3 hours south of Dakar and stayed with a peace corps volunteer who works with small business enterprise, or more tries to work with small business enterprise, with fairly limited success. She was really nice though and from North Central IL and when she is done with her service in November will probably be moving to Chicago with her Senegalese fiance. We walked around the village Saturday and then met up with my friend Margaret, who was actually staying with another peace corps volunteer in the next village. Margaret spent the rest of the weekend with us, Saturday we watched a movie with Elizabeth's host siblings and just hung around and then Sunday we went to this larger town nearby that has a lot of tourists and hotels and went to the beach. The town isn't really on the ocean, but it is in the delta so the river has beach like things. We went to one of the hotels for a soda and stayed for a few hours in their pool, which was a lot of fun, but again, not very rural. Then Margaret and I left at 3am Monday morning to head back to Dakar since we knew a bus would come through then and if we waited until later we would have to stand on the side of the road and hope that some vehicle came by going to Dakar.
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