Senegal is a fascinating place. Very different from Morocco. It is still Islamic, but Islam doesn't influence the way women dress. Thank God! It seems that in Morocco, as soon as a woman is married she has to turn off the sexy--provided she ever turned it on to begin with. But in Senegal, women turn up the sexy. Always. It just makes for a nicer environment. The men here are tall. Very tall. The only people I saw shorter than me are either mutants or victims of accidents that took off their legs. And, yes, I've seen both of those. Many are really skinny. I mean really really skinny. I'm surprised that such skinny people can even walk.
Mosquitos come out at dusk. My hope was to prevent them from biting me, but I've gotten 3 bites so far that I know of. Three too many. One of these days, one of them will have malaria. As I type this, I'm sitting under a mosquito net at Via Via. There aren't too many mosquitos here, but there were a couple in the shower, so I figured I better deploy it tonight. The bed is a sort of 4 post bed that the net attaches to. So far there haven't been any anchor points at the other hotels I stayed in if I had brought my own net. I've also seen a mouse or two and these neat little lizards. The sea birds I saw here are black. I expected sea gulls along the Atlantic, not black birds. I wonder if the same evolutionary forces that result in differences in skin pigmentation in humans also effects birds. I don't think they were black sea gulls, though.
The streets of Yoff are interesting. They are basically sand. The narrow ones are just less than a car width. There are women out doing laundry in buckets, schools with cartoony depictions of teachers talking to students in French painted on the sides as murals, little stores, an amazing number of goats... I find myself walking closer to traffic than I would in the US. I hope I don't get clipped. For the most part I'm ignored. So far only a tiny handful of children have asked for money and all they do is hod their hand out. The streets don't have stinky areas like in Morocco. Unpleasant smells are much rarer in Senegal. There are, however, piles of rubbish everywhere. But it's not organic rotting stuff--just random stuff that has no place to go. You do see lots of women walking around with buckets and trays and bowls in their heads. It's cool to watch them.
There are tons of taxis. You can always find a taxi. Some of the drivers are pretty honest and give a reasonable quote. Of course there are no meters. You just gotta set a price.
One interesting thing I saw at the airport was that the buses that take us to customs and immigration had a nameplate with the manufacturer and the manufacturer's email address. The buses didn't look all that old--they were in excellent shape, in fact. But the email address for this bus manufacturer was a compuserve.com address. A mystery. At least it wasn't one of those numbered compuserve addresses they had before they let you choose something left of the @.
Outside my place, all the locals were watching some sporting event on TV. I went out to see what it was thinking it would be soccer. Actually, it turned out to be a sort of Senegalese Sumo boxing thing. The two players start out in the middle and sort of make motions as if they are swimming. They sort of mirror each other and every once in a while, one guy grabs the other's hand then goes in for the kill by punching him. Eventually one player will be forced out the circular sumo like ring. That player is the winner. It is sort of a slow motion sumo match. But the pacing of the matches is similar to sumo.
As with Morocco, I'm trying to figure out what poverty is. It's easy to look around and say there is poverty everywhere, but in fact, there seems to be a very large section of the population that lives under conditions unacceptable to an American but acceptable to them. After all, everyone they know lives this way, they grew up this way. When a way of life is acceptable to the general population, I can't say that such conditions are evidence of poverty. Certainly, this people aren't rich and they can't afford luxuries, but they seem to be able to afford the basics needed for life. And their community with their friends probably accounts for much of their quality of life. I learned in Bluefields, Nicaragua that standard of living and quality of life are much less connected than they appear in America. Americans tend to think that increasing our standard of living brings a corresponding increase in quality of life. But it doesn't. It is true up to some figure, but there is a level of income where it ceases to be true. It is part of the reason I take time off. I am willing to let my average income drop back to that line in exchange for what is far more valuable--time.
I met a British guy named Jonathan. He has done quite a bit of traveling in Africa and this is his first trip to west Africa. He said he thought traveling in east and south Africa was hard until he came to west Africa. I guess I started out with the hard part. Of course I knew that. It was intentional. He gave me a few bits of advice. I've decided after talking to him, that I should northern Nigeria rather than southern Nigeria. I still get to say I've been to Nigeria, but I don't have to put up with Lagos and the river delta where oil workers are constantly kidnapped. I can then enter Cameroon from the north up near lake Chad and then come down to Yaoundé. That is where I would end my west Africa part. Jonathan is also amazed by the things people sell. He was walking along and somebody offered to sell him a drill.
I had a guy offer me a voltage regulator. He was selling phone cards and a voltage regulator--about 12" by 8" by 6". There in his hand. Why? If it happened to be the case that I was in need of such a voltage regulator, would I buy from him? Or a store that properly sells voltage regulators?
The phone card thing is interesting. There are 2 big companies--Tigo and the French Orange. You see them everywhere. Every other store seems to have an Orange logo or a Tigo logo and many many corners are populated with young men selling Orange cards.
To get your attention, the Senegalese make a hissing sound with their teeth. I'll be walking by and I'll hear a "ssss" and often it's for me. Sort of interesting. It sure wouldn't fly in the US. I imagine when the visit the US, the first advice they get from their friends is to not hiss to get someone's attention.
Many men here walk around pinching their pants about where their joystick is. I'm not sure what they are holding.
There is not a lot of begging, Senegal being a predominantly Muslim country. But the small children do a little bit. It is sort of interesting--they carry in their left arms coffee cans or bowls or whatever they can find as containers that are roughly round and 6 or 8 inches in diameter, I got a chance to look into a few of these to see if they have anything in there. One thing that seems to be common is sugar cubes.
On Friday morning, I noticed that many women were getting on the bus in the most incredible colorful traditional outfits. The Senegalese do colorful clothes like nobody. They are just amazing. I was thinking about the efforts that celebrities go through on Oscar night to look interesting. They should forget all that stupid haute couture crap. They need to come to Senegal and pick a dress off the rack. The first person to do that will be the best dressed. It'll blow Joan Rivers's mind.
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