Apparently the end of September and October are wrought with power outages each year. So far this has proved to be true, as I have had to sit in a dark classroom on more than one occasion the past week.
Some of the other students here and I have discussed how we feel like we're in high school again in many ways. First of all, all of our classes are in one building, and we have a standard school day of class roughly 9-6 with a lunch break. We are taking all of our classes with the same group of 48 students. At the end of the day, we return to our respective families' houses. A few students even have curfews. Of course, for the first time ever I can go to a bar or buy alcohol in a store without being carded, so I'm not complaining.
I also just had delicious PIZZA from a TURKISH restaurant in SENEGAL. How is that for mixing cultures? It came with complimentary tea.
Next week is fall break. On Saturday I will be going south to the Petite Côte to a town called Mbour. Twelve of us are renting a beach house for the week. There is supposed to be a big forest with Baobabs and giraffes nearby that we hope to tour. Don't worry Dad, I will stay away from the spear-wielding chimps (See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6387611.stm). Otherwise, I have no idea what we are going to do.
This was not our original plan. We at first had this awesome trip to the Cassamance (a region in Southern Senegal) planned out, but then it turned out that the US State Dept "strongly discourages" travel along some of the roads we were planning to take. Whoops. Then just a few days ago a few of villages in the Cassamance were pillaged by rebels, so that was enough for the CIEE staff to nix our plan. While that is a completely understandable course of action, we each had already spent $60 on non-refundable ferry tickets to get there and back to Dakar. We decided to do something else entirely, so we looked into rental houses in Mbour. We found one that only charges 500 Euro per week and will fit 12 people, so we booked it... only to find out that we kind of took the house from another group of CIEE students who were supposed to get a special deal since they knew the guy who owned the house. So, that created some tension. Anyway, we are supposed to take a few "sept places" (taxis with seven seats) out there Saturday morning, so hopefully everything goes well. This has been enough of a saga already.
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