Bonjour-Mundo!

After 26 or so VERY long hours, I have finally arrived in Senegal, Dakar to be specific. So far; so good. The trip here was not the most fun and I arrived grimy and exhausted; but I made it. The flight from Madrid to Dakar was interesting as they drove us out to the plane , but then we couldnt get on until they loaded 4 men from the back of a police van onto the plane, then a french man ran around yelling because he thought his luggage wasnt being put on board…which then turned into half the plane freaking out, I had no clue what was going on. Luckily it was all a misunderstanding, and the spanish speaking senegalese man that was sitting next to me mananged to ask and explain everything to me. And luckily; all the luggqge mqde it in one piece. Crazy people. Emily picked me up along with Lamine…her senegalese boyfriend and a friend of his. We took a taxi back to her place and I crashed. There has been no electricity in her area for the past week or so, so needless to say there wasnt much to see when I got there around 11pm.

In the morning I saw her house, its very nice; big, and had adorable baby kittens in the courtyard. My first impressions of Dakar have been good. Its almost exactly like what I pictured an African city to be like in my head. A little dusty in parts, lots of cars and lots of people, lots of random animals….think goats and horse drawn buggy things. There are also lots of these very colorful mini bus things which we rode into town. Ecuador people, think of something kind of like a chiva from festivales de quito. Much of the development is run down, and the poverty in some places is very evident. There are random piles of stuff, garbage, tires, one plqce we drove by seemed to have a pile of old tvs.

The people have been very friendly and are understanding of my lack of french. So far Ive got one phrase in wolof.. mangi fii rekk, basically translated, i am fine.

Its been extremely interesting for me to just people watch, there is a pretty much even mixture of people in traditional clothes and those dressed in a more western style. Today the one white person we saw was wearing nothing but white mens briefs, a puffy bunny tail and bunny ears…hmm, no wonder they think we Americans are nuts.  There are women carrying goods on their head and people trying to get us to buy their wares. The market slogan is apparently if you cant find it here; you dont need it. And according to emily, its the truth. Hopefully I will see more of it soon…Alex, be prepared to bring stuff home for me 🙂

Allrighty, I hope you are all doing well, be sure to send me your address if you would like a postcard. The rest of the week we will be in dakar I believe; then we are going to some islands on the coast and a place called saint louis, I will try to keep the map updated. Keep in touch, even if I dont get the chanc eto respond to your email; I love to read them. Take Care! I will update again soon.

 

 

 

Tags: Dakar, Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at 9:27 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.