Day 1: And The Journey Begins...

Well, due to the encouragement of others (more commonly known as peer pressure) it looks like I am going to be keeping a blog for my journeys (or at least attempting to – the homestay that I am about to be in supposedly does not have Wi-Fi, so figuring out how to post entries should be an adventure).  Today is the first day of my month long adventure in Africa.  I am participating in a French study abroad program for Maymester (one of The Ohio State University’s more interesting inventions – it involves the cramming of an entire semester’s worth of work into approximately 25 days).  I am journeying with seven other girls and four guys, as well as one professor.  We will be studying at the University of Dakar in Senegal, working through the West African Research Center.  We left Columbus, Ohio a little after noon yesterday, and arrived in Senegal around 5:30am, just in time for a quick nap before getting on with our day.  Honestly, it feels like I’ve been here for three days we crammed so much into today.  A lot of the day was centered around food, as our professor attempted to introduce us to as many different aspects of Senegalese cuisine as possible.  Here, it isn’t unusual to eat on a carpet instead of at a table, or to have many people share one plate of food.  It is also considered impolite to eat with your fork in your left hand, so we lefties are struggling a bit.  A lot of the dishes also consist of many different types of food all mixed together into one plate, so our vegetarians have been finding it difficult to determine which plates they can eat from.  Our professor just laughed at them when he heard that they were going to attempt to stick to their vegetarian diets in Senegal, since one of his sons is a vegetarian and he knows how difficult it is to find appropriate food here.  Our professor’s sister-in-law insisted on cooking dinner for us so we all got to meet a large portion of his family.  His niece is adorable, although we did have a close call in which she fell headfirst off of a chair, just barely saved by the foot of our professor’s sister-in-law, as one of the men also launched to get her and accidentally knocked over a glass, which shattered next to the girl’s head.  We also had the opportunity to visit a mall in Dakar, which was much more modernized than I had expected it to be.  It wasn’t a huge mall, but the shops were nice, and they had several chains which we recognized, such as Guess and Aldo.  Clothing in Dakar is definitely on the more expensive side though.  Outside of the mall though it is pretty clear that Senegal is not an overly rich country.  A lot of the buildings are in disrepair, and trash seems to collect along the sides of the roads.  There are a lot of stray cats here, which are all extremely thin compared to the ones in the United States.  The flowers are all really pretty though, people do still seem to enjoy gardening here.  For these first few nights we are staying in guest housing within the university, until we become more accustomed to the city.  We are within a block of the ocean.  It seems that the seaside is the preferred spot to work out, as we see hundreds of people running along the shoreline.  There are also these outdoor gyms which are free to the public, where the locals will go to lift weights and do push-ups and do whatever else people do when they work out (can you tell that I never go to the gym unless I’m dragged?).  Perhaps the weirdest part of the day was when we were being given a tour of WARC, and we ran into a couple of other American students who were studying there.  Turns out, three out of the four of them were from the University of Michigan (to those who aren’t aware: the rivalry between our two schools is possibly the biggest in the history of the world.)  There was definitely a good amount of good-natured cat-calling (most of it from our professor, in fact.)  Overall, the country is definitely different from the United States, but the people here seem to be really nice, and I am definitely looking forward to the opportunity to explore the city and its surrounding attractions for the next month.  I’ll see you all in June! (Or for those of you who are living in Columbus - May 30^th, be there or else.  It will be my 21^st when I come back into the country, and we are going out.  Screw jetlag.)