Oh Blog, I know I've neglected you and I'm sorry. But if only you understood the existential and absurd tragicomedy that is Spring Semester Abroad '08, then maybe you wouldn't look so sad and despondent. Seriously, my stay here in Senegal has actually been one very very very long day punctuated by meals. Or like Groundhog Day in Africa. I have to keep re-doing the same day until I have discovered who I really am and the meaning of life and true love and stuff.

In order to actually recount anything that has happened to me, I would have to write a seminal, groundbreaking work in the post-post-modern-anti-reality aesthetic. WHICH DOESN'T EXIST YET. But here I go trying anyway.


Every day, this is pretty much what happens:

1. Wake up in time for breakfast (7-10 every day except 8-10:30 on Sundays); very important, breakfast is the best meal of the day. Bread with butter (or cheese if you get there early enough!) and tea with too much sugar and powdered milk in a bowl. Sometimes, if you get there at exactly the right time, there is hot chocolate.

2. Change location. Sometimes I go back to my room but usually I go to the UFR, which is where all the classrooms are and the computer room is. Lately I have been on this kick where I get up early and exercise. I am too embarassed to exercise outside most of the time (it is rare that women here exercise) so I do whatever calisthenics/pilates/yoga melange I can manage in my little room.

3. Decide where I am going to have lunch. This is possibly the most important and most challenging part of my day. Mostly, the Resto (ie, school cafeteria) sucks; however, there is a NEW Resto that opened this semester that is usually AWESOME. Generally, I make sure that I check the meal schedule that is posted in my Village before I go to breakfast so I can plan step 2. with step 3. already in mind. If I am at the UFR I am much closer to the NEW and AWESOME Resto, but even more conveniently, I am also equidistant from the buvettes (re: shops that sell assorted food products and make traditional senegalese plates for lunch) on both of the residential campuses. I much prefer the buvettes on Campus 2, where I live, mostly because I know the ladies who work in them and they think me and my little American friends are hilarious and get really excited every time we come by. Given that, if not even the NEW Resto seems appetizing, I head to a buvette where I can not only enjoy a usually delicious plate of rice and other stuff, but I can chat in Wolof with my friends as well.

4. Find something to occupy myself until it is time to go to lunch. Entirely dependent on the decisions made in step 2.

5. Go to lunch.

6. Change locations. Sometimes I go back to the UFR, sometimes I go back to my room, and sometimes I go to a friend's room. This is also a very important decision because after lunch is visiting time. One thing I have learned about myself is that I am much more anti-social that one would think; I do not like having people come to my room to say hello to me when I don't know that they are coming, even though that is a very nice thing that people do. I just don't like it. I spend a lot of time avoiding visitors, to the point that I think I have a reputation for being hard to locate and never in my room.

7. Decide where I am going to have dinner. The Restos are often much better for dinner, but if the seem neexul (Wolof fornot delicious), egg sandwiches are sold at every buvette and always a delicious backup plan.

8. Do something to pass the time until dinner. I do a lot of napping, a lot of imagination apartment hunting on the internet, a lot of reading, and a LOT of sudoku.

9. Go to dinner.

10. Go to a friend's room for tea or make tea in my room (I finally learned how to make attaaya! It is really easy and I will do it for you all the time when I get back.). Considering the fact that half of the population of UGB wants to be my best friend, I am never wont for attaaya invitations. This is a great time passer because it takes at least an hour and a half, and often up to four hours!

11. Decide when I am going to breakfast the next day.

12. Go to bed.

Sometimes I go to a movie on Tuesday nights in town, sometimes I go visit my two friends in town, Youssou the Tailor and Tam-Tam the Artisan, and very occasionally I have Wolof class on Wednesday or Friday afternoons.

I just noticed that my day has twelve steps, reinforcing the suspicion that I have actually been in re-hab for the past five months.


But then sometimes other things happen! Like that one time I went to an Islamic tent revival at 2:00 to 6:00 in the morning. Or that time that I spent the day in the ghetto of Dakar with my friend who tried to convert me to this loopy sect of Islam where no one prays, they just sing and make money. Or when I went on a safari (no lions, just a lot of warthogs and these deer things that had really fat necks and little heads). Or when I went on a Catholic pilgrimage and slept in a tent with all of the Catholics in West Africa. Or that other time I slept outside on a basketball court because I went to this big music festival in a town that had no hotels. These are the things that I do, or, more acurately, the things that happen to me.