Mon Séjour au Sénégal: Beth Travels Abroad: Spring break!

So for spring break my friends and I didn't plan much of an itinerary. We wanted to go to Mali, though, so we got the visa to go there (it may or may not have been purchased about 48 hours before our departure... so we didn't plan hardly at all). We figured it is more Senegalese to go with the flow and see what happens; even if we had planned a schedule it wouldn' have worked out that way. So we set off on our 5- star adventure exactly two weeks ago on that friday night, traveling from Dakar (on the west coast) on a ferry to Ziguinshor in southern Senegal. See map:

They called it a ferry but as you can see it was more like a ship! One could buy an armchair or a bed to sleep in, so being students we got the cheaper armchair version. This made for a crazy night sprawled out on the floor and on each other.

Here we are eating breakfast the next morning: pain au chocolat ou pain avec la beurre (baguette with chocolate or baguette with butter) et le café ou chocolat chaud (coffee or hot chocolate). Mmm breakfast is my favorite meal here in Senegal!

Our friend Babacar had a friend named Atch living in Ziguinshor, so we stayed with him that night. What teranga and hospitality! Staying with locals is so much more interesting than hotels! In this next picture we are eating lunch. This is how the Senegalese eat-- everyone sits around the communal bowl/plate of food, and you eat the food that is in your pie slice-shaped section of the plate. Traditionally one eats with the right hand (the guy on the right, Atch, he is eating in this traditional way). With modern influences, however, people use spoons too. At my host family's house, some people eat with their hands, others with a spoon. I choose a spoon-- I get rice everywhere when I try to eat with my hands! Also traditionally people will eat sitting on the floor as we are doing here. In Dakar, though, being a city and somewhat more westernized, people will eat sitting around a table.

But at any rate, in this picture we are eating yassa poulet, a rice and chicken dish with sauce. It's good stuff! A bit spicier than American food, but you get used to it!

Ziguinshor is the big city in the Casamance (southern) region. The evening at Atch's house we talked about some of the issues with the Casamance, because it has a reputation of having some political unrest and rebels. Obviously our program still allowed us to travel to the Casamance, and the problems aren't as bad as they used to be. Apparently the problems stem from some minority rebels wanting the Casamance to separate from Senegal. The Casamance has more natural resources and is more fertile than the rest of Senegal, and of course the Senegalese government wants to keep Casamance and use those resources for the entire country.

Before we went to Casamance, we were told from unofficial sources that we shouldn't pick fruit from trees, because in the past (like a few years ago) some rebels put mines around trees! Not that we were going to pick fruit to begin with, but good to know. Pretty crazy, and we talked about how difficult it is for the government to fight back rebels that are so secretive and put mines in unsuspecting places.

But besides this scary bit about Casamance, it really was wonderful in Ziguinshor. It was so calm compared to the big busy city of Dakar, the neighborhood that we were in had grass and houses and everyone was so much more laid back. There is a lot of fishing there and there were a lot of pirogues (fishing boats) all around. I thought this was a cool one: :)