In Saint Louis

Hello again! Sorry for the lack of updates! I was in the middle of writing an entry the other night when the electricity went out.I'm having a bit of bad luck with the cyber cafes but I suppose that is to be expected. Plus it always takes me longer to type because the keyboards at the different places are different (French set up, English set up, keys that don't correspond with what is written on them).

I am currently in Saint-Louis in the north of Senegal with my friend Kris who was also in Senegal for the 2002-2003 academic year. She spent half of her time up here doing an internship with the same organization that I worked with. We arrived yesterday and are leaving tomorrow morning. We have mostly spent time visiting her friends,"family", and the baby who was named after her. When you ask her what her name is she says "Kristen". So cute! The mother also just had another baby so we have had fun playing with the kids, who are very useful for learning Wolof since many of them don't learn French until they begin school. We took really cute pictures so hopefully I'll be able to post some eventually.

It's dirtier than I remember it being here. I didn't live away from Dakar for very long so I guess I'm not as used to it. It's especially bad in the winter because there is so much wind, and with all the sand, dust is everywhere and it's hard not to feel dirty. Most of the neightborhood roads are sand and walking from house to house leaves the feel very dirth and dry! It's also harder to be a tourist here for some reasons. Since it's not as big of a city, people seem to spend more of their time occupying themselves with tourists....little kids asking for money, older men trying to talk to us, Baay Falls (sp?) asking us for money for those of you who know what that is. We have already seen 2 baay fall/local fights which seems VERY strange. We were in a tourist shop today and the owner actually ran in to get a souvenir sword to threatn the guys with. Dakar seems to have gotten MUCH better in comparison. St. Louis is smaller though and so is a lot easier to deal with. Taxis are cheaper and there's no bargaining involved!

We took a taxi up here on Wednesday morning. Our driver was a friend of the director of my old internship. Amusingly, Malick, the driver, doesn't really speak French. Therefore wr had fun trying to talk to him in Wolof, which at this point, although it is improving, is still a little broken! We know enough to get by though and he was very nice.

We got here at about 3 pm and found a little hostel type place (Auberge de la Vallée) to stay at. It was.....okay. Kind of difficult to deal with though because there is no hot water, which although is to be expected, is hard to deal with in the winter. Even though I am from Minnesota, I am sad to say that it actually does get cold here at night. And not only is in the 50s outside, but because there are usually no real windows (with glass), it's also in the 50s inside. Even the best Minnesotans wouldn't want to take a cold shower in that weather!

After leaving our baggage there and figuring out the lock on our door actually DID lock, we left on a long series of inquiries as to where people are now living, what they doing and finding them. It was great to see how happy everyone was to see her. So yeah...a lot of visiting, invitations, etc. I was mostmy along for thr ride but had met some of the people before. Everyone kept buying us soda as a hospitality gesture and insisting that we keep drinking so by the end of the day we had drunk a little more sugar than we would have liked!

We went out that night to the Safari Club where one of Kris's friends works as a bartender. It's a new place definitely created for toursits. We got a tour and thought about staying there but decided it would be a little too expensive. However, after waking up today to cold water again, we decided to splurge and stay there tonight. Really, it's only about 30 dollars a night total.

Time is almost up....to be continued!