Day 2: Getting to Know the People and the City

Today we were paired with students who attend the university here and are studying English.  I believe they are all part of the English Club.  Me and another girl were paired with two girls from Dakar, and the students from both groups were led on a tour of some of the university’s more interesting, in particular those associated with marine biology and chemistry.   Their facilities do not appear to be as high-tech as those in the United States, but they get the job done, and they seem to be studying some pretty interesting things.  (Not that I understood any of it, my brain was not built for science.)  After we were given a small amount of money and permitted to go out with our partners, so that they could show us some of their favorite places around the university.  The school is much bigger than I had initially realized.  According to Dr. Thiam approximately 80,000 students attend the university.  We got along very well with the girls we were paired with.  Turns out, girls have the same interests everywhere in the world.  We mostly talked about dancing and boys.  We taught them the meaning of the words ‘cougar,’ and ‘summer fling,’ and they started planning a party they want to throw while we are still in the country.  We learned that Senegalese women also believe in wearing heels which are much too high to ever be comfortable in the name of fashion and then praising God when they are finally permitted to take them off.  The one thing they couldn’t wrap their minds around was that not all women in the United States want to have children.  I think children are too important to the culture here for a woman to not plan on getting married and having a family.  One of our partners came from a family of ten, and she hopes to have five children.  During our free time, we Americans also decided to take the time to explore the beach across from the university.  Apparently it’s one of the most polluted beaches in Senegal, so no one really swims there, although we did find one person snorkeling just off the coast.  It was still a very pretty shoreline though, and the water was very clear.  I was surprised to find out from our Dakarian partners though that many of them can’t swim.  It seems dangerous not to have that skill set when you live in a city surrounded by water.  I suppose it’s possible that most of them don’t have much reason to go into the water though.  Most of the water seems to be fairly shallow close to the shore.  I don’t think pools are a thing here, which amazes me since the weather is so hot.  I guess that would be considered a waste of water though, which is somewhat of a precious resource here.  The water from the tap isn’t drinkable at all, our professor has informed us that we will almost certainly get sick if we drink it, so we have to buy water to do things such as brush our teeth.  The locals supposedly drink some sort of filtered water, but our professor has forbidden us from consuming anything but the bottled variety.  We aren’t even allowed to drink juice that isn’t bottled in case it has been made with the local water.  With that said, the juices here are fantastic – I will be going out of my way when I get back to the states to find someplace which sells La Gazelle’s pineapple juice.

A Traditional Senegalese Plate

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.)