look at the toubabs!

wolof word of the day: toubab. it means white person. my mom told me it's not mean or offensive, but everywhere we go we hear it. my other favorite new phrase is leegi-leegi (pronounced leggy-leggy). it means "see you later", but actually leegi means now, so when you say it it's kind of like saying i'll see you later but i wish i was seeing you right now. or something like that.

saturday we went to the pink lake, which is theoretically "near" Dakar, but because it's senegal it took us about 3 hours to get there and 4 hours to get home. It's called pink lake because there is some kind of algae in it that makes the water look pink when the sun shines on it. It's also salty, and there is a layer of salty foam over the sand around the edge which is really weird and cool. That was really fun until we got attacked by people trying to sell us crappy jewelry and sand paintings, which is what happens when white people go to tourist destinations here.

Yesterday, our program assistant Josephine invited us to a baptism at her house for her cousin's baby. We were already running about an hour late when we called her, but we met her and she said she was going to the hair salon and we could come with her. That was actually kind of fun because I like hair salons a lot, but after about an hour she said she was going to be a while and we should go ahead, and she would meet us. When we got there and met the other Americans, it was basically just a bunch of people sitting around, and a bunch of African children swarming us and touching our hair and calling us toubabs (the ones who could talk). After being covered in child germs and snot, we got to eat out of a big plate of meat and rice, with our hands! By the time we had to leave, Josephine still hadn't arrived, and when we asked her about it today, she just responded "Mais ca, c'est le Senegal". Which was my thought exactly when it took us 3 hours to get to school today. It's a 20 minute bus ride, but we managed to get lost and spend 2 hours wandering around Dakar before finding our school. Even after a week, the incredibly slow pace of life is already getting to me and I found myself wondering why I wasn't overly angry and frustrated, as I would have been if this had happened any other place.

Other recent adventures include eating a soup made from a boiled goat's head. My brother and sister were arguing about what certain pieces were because they knew the word in wolof but not french. I told them not to tell me, but at one point it was pretty obvious I was eating the tongue. Among the students on my program, we call these "chew once, then swallow" meals. Other than that, all of the weird things that happen here are pretty awesome. Life is pretty different here but I totally love it.