Update on the kids

This is what Papi Joe wore to school on Mardi gras. 

Nogay's favorite thing in my room is my suitcase. She will always get it form under my bed and talk about "ma valise verte"

Arame Yvone

Arame Yvone is my oldest little sister, she's about 10 years old. She's super cute but also really mature and clearly takes her oldest sibling role seriously. She's the one who will always tell me that my things are "too beautiful" and she always talks very maturely like that. Yesterday she made me laugh so hard. She asked what I did the first time I was in Senegal, so I told her that this was my first time here and she was super surprised. Her exact words (in french) were: "What? I cannot believe my eyes. That is incredible, you will truly discover it." This is how I imagine Hattie talking when she is 10.

Ile d'Ngor

This is ile d'Ngor, a small island just north of Dakar. We took a day trip there and just relaxed, ate lunch, had fresh fruit, made ataaya, and went swimming.

We took a Pirogue boat to get there.

This is me with my brother, Petit Papa.

This is a cool view of Ouakam. If you look closely you can see the monument and the light house on top of the two hills in the background. 

Papa Sene

 I finally made it to Papa Sene's house! They live about an hour from Ouakam in a town called Petit Mbao. There's a bus that goes directly there so it's pretty easy to visit. My visit was apparently a pretty big deal. They invited the whole family over to have lunch with me, and they made a super special Ceebu Jen:

Ceebu Jen is the national dish of Senegal. This is a particularly fancy one. Normally Ceebu Jen is fish and rice (ceebu means rice and jen means fish) served with some vegetables, usually carrots, cabbage, eggplant, this green bitter tomato thing, and sometimes potato or sweet potato. This particular one also had lobster and shrimp, which I had never seen before. They also hired a professional photographer and gave me a dress and did my hair.

The person in the green is Papa's sister, Fatou. The kids I think are her's, or maybe another sister's kids. Their names are Massa and Amou (spelling?) And the woman in the white is Papa's mom.

This sign is posted right above their front door. The 240 CPS is for our apartment in New York, and the Beth is for Beth Korein. Samba has done an enormous amount for the family, including buying their house, so I think they have a huge appreciation for anyone who helps Samba. It is also a cultural thing to show their familial respect.

This is how I eat most of my meals here: everyone gathers around a large bowl of food and takes from their own little section. All the food in the middle is in big chunks, so if you want some you cut off a little piece with your spoon and bring it back to your area to eat.

Xiim attaya (make tea)

The Senegalese have a special tea that I like but it is a very unique taste that a lot of the other students don't like it. The strong taste is partially hidden by the immense amount of sugar they add to it though. It is always served in these shot glasses and when they make it they fill one and a half of the glasses with sugar and dump it in the tea, so the tea is literally half sugar. The traditional way of drinking it is having three rounds, and each round the tea gets sweeter and sweeter. My brother also always adds mint to the second batch.

When they make it they always pour from really high up and I have not yet seen one person spill even the tiniest bit, but when I tried it I had a lot of trouble not spilling most of it.

This is my brother making some attaya at the beach. It is really a big social thing, someone will make the tea and then they pass around the glasses to everyone.

Reserve de Bandia

To finish our vacation we took a trip to the Reserve de Bandia, which is about an hour and half away from Dakar. The place was very touristy, with a fancy restaurant and everything, but that's what I expected anyways. The restaurant had monkey's everywhere just chilling on the table. At one point some of the monkey's got in a huge fight/wrestling match with each other which was interesting to watch. 

This little wise guy was watching us from behind looking all innocent when suddenly he jumped to our table, stole my friend's pizza, and ran away.

The evidence:

Afterwards he went to chill nonchalantly next to the sign that says "Please do not feed the monkeys"

Some more animals we saw on our safari ride:

Ostrich

This is called an antelope du cheval (horse antelope)

 Some giraffes and baby giraffes!

 And a rhino! Which I was really excited to see because they are endangered and it is really rare to see one.

 This is a special baobab tree that I think some celebrity is buried under, I can't remember who.

St. Louis

After Lampoul we went to visit St. Louis, which used to be the capital of Senegal. It was nice and had a pretty river, but I felt much more at home in Dakar.

We took at tour on a "Pirogue" which is this traditional Senegalese fishing boat. As you can see from the pictures above the Pirogue boats where everywhere, which I think was my favorite part of St. Louis.

The picture below is Mauritania, we saw the boarder on our boat tour.

The was the resort we stayed at. I didn't get many pictures of it, but the laundry cart was designed to look like a car rapide, which I will post about soon so that you can have a better appreciation for how awesome it is.

 I took this picture during our ride back from St. Louis to Dakar. There was tons of desert and lots of Baobob trees, which was really cool. We also saw some random camels on our way back - i don't know if they were wild or not but it was the middle of nowhere so I'm guessing so. 

Lampoul

The first stop of my spring break was to Lampoul, north of Dakar. We took a taxi set-place there, which is basically an old station wagon that will take you anywhere for cheaper than a regular taxi would. We showed up at the set-place station and it was a super super crowded parking lot where at least 3 people at all times are trying to either sell you something or get you to take their taxi set-place. Once we bargained down the price we waited inside the car as venders stuck their hands through the windows trying to sell us stuff. Some things like peanuts and oranges made sense, but then they started offering things like clocks and baby toys and I don't know they though a group of teenagers in a taxi parking lot are the right costumers for that. 

After our very long and hot journey crammed in the set-place, we arrived at the town of Lampoul, where a hotel employee was supposed to pick us up. He didn't show up at first so we kept calling and the hotel kept saying "he'll be there soon" or "he should be there already." After an hour and a half someone showed up in a Toyota pickup truck and started to make a phone call. My phone started ringing so we realized this was the guy, but when we asked about Lodge de Lampoul, he said "no this is camp de lampoul." So then we showed him the printed sheet and he said that that was his phone number, but he doesn't work at lodge de lampoul. I have no idea to this day if lodge de lampoul even exists but we ended up just going to a completely different camp site than we expected. But no complaints because it was really really nice and super pretty! 

This is our off-road adventure

This is the camp site. There's really not much more too it other than a bar/restaurant (also in a tent). Other than that it's just sand for miles.

This is our room in the tent.

We even had our own personal tent bathroom

And we got to ride camels in the sunset! They are really much taller than you'd think and when the camel stands up and sits down you feel like your gonna fall off. Afterwards that night we ate dinner with the hotel employees and also a ton of french tourists. The frenchies were nice but I liked the fact that we were staying here for 4 months cause it separated us from the tourists. They might speak better french then us but we were the only ones who knew Wolof! 

After dinner we walked outside of the tent to one of the starriest skies I have ever seen in my life. From the pictures you can tell that there were absolutely no clouds that day, so being in the middle of the desert there was not really any light pollution so you can see the milky way and everything.

This was a special jam we had for breakfast. The baobab tree is a symbolic tree in Senegal and they are everywhere, especially near the desert. They are used to make jelly and also a really good fruit juice I like here called Monkey Bread.

And finally before leaving we got to go sand dune surfing! It's pretty anti-climatic. You jump on the board and then just slowly inch down, and if you try standing up the board just sinks into the sand. But then fun part was rolling down the hill and running down the hill. I had sand in my hair/clothes for days though.

SHEEP

So a while ago the kids randomly all started talking about a "mouton" which is a sheep. I have a little toy sheep so I assumed they were talking about that until I went to the roof to get my clothes and actually saw this sheep. Me and my brother took some pictures with it. For the next couple of days I got constant updates from the kids on the sheep like, "it's so big" and "it keeps making noise." One time they said "the sheep is on the move" and then all ran into my room yelling that they were afraid of the sheep. I heard it "baa" from upstairs and told them there was nothing to worry about. Then it kept getting louder and louder until I heard this huge baa right outside my room and all of the kids started yelling which made the sheep baa louder. It was chaotic to say the least. Finally they reported back that sheep was dead : ( No one ever explained this sheep to me but my theory is that it was for the Baptism.

The next day they ran into my room talking about the really huge sheep and I thought they were talking about the same one that died, but then I walked outside and right there in the hallway was a giant sheep with huge horns. I have no idea what happened to this sheep but I have a theory that it might have been my dinner one night.