Yesterday was our last full day in Cape Town. We went to a winery for a cellar tour and a tasting. I am sold on South African wine. I had had some previous to this trip and liked it but obviously have had plenty while here and I am a believer.
Recommendations include: 2011 Neil Ellis Sauvignon Blanc, 2010 Newton Johnson Sauvignon Blanc, 2011 Fleur du Cap Sauvignon Blanc, and 2010 Groot Constantia Semillon-Sauvignon Blanc (the last being of the winery we went to yesterday).
No, they don't make only sauvignon blancs here, that just happens to be something Mom and I agree on. All those bottles are between $8-$12. I can't imagine they're much more at home.
In the afternoon after the winery we went to the World of Birds, a large and impressively stocked bird sanctuary (and not just of birds, also emu, alpacas, monkeys, and various other small creatures). I took lots of pictures that will have to wait with all the others to get uploaded.
My goal for the flights today and tomorrow is to go through all the pictures, get rid of the hundreds of bad ones, and organize the small amount that remains so that I can upload them quickly when I get home. Then I will begin posting links to albums of specific things, so there will be a safari album, a Dakar album, a food album, etc.
This is my last post before getting on the plane so the next update will be stateside. (Hopefully, anyway -- who can say for sure that we won't spend a bonus 48 hours in Dakar again?)
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Swimming with the fishes
When we went to the aquarium the other day we passed by an exhibit about microscopes. There was a girl behind a table showing passersby how this super-duper microscope works. She would point it at one of the tiny pieces of coral or whatever she had on the table and a huge hi-def live image would show up on the connected TV screen. When we walked up she was talking about some squiggly thing writhing across the screen, some sort of predatory plant.
When she finished, she held up a very small beaker in between her thumb and forefinger, no bigger than a shot glass, filled with what appeared to be water. "Now," she said. "Who is going to stick their finger in this beaker and have a taste?" She looked me dead in the eye.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I'll tell you afterwards."
Never one to turn down a snack, I stuck my finger in the beaker. Room temperature water. I slurped down the mystery drink. Salty water. Boo-ooring.
"So?" she asked. "Not so bad, right?"
"Saltwater?" I hoped.
She stuck the beaker under the microscope. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny fish were swimming furiously in all directions.
"Zooplankton!"
I considered all the teeny tiny bones and teeny tiny shells and teeny tiny bodies I had just ingested without any physical effort.
I felt like a zooplankton the following day as I sat on the floor of the predator tank, watching a shark swim toward me.
I've watched plenty of documentaries on sharks and I've seen them in aquariums but it wasn't until they were within arm's length, with no glass between us, that I realized why they are so menacing, perhaps more than many other predators. If you've ever seen a cat you know what sort of mood a lion is in. Same thing with dogs and hyenas. When elephants stick their ears out and make noise you know they're upset. Horses stomp around. Birds puff up their feathers. And so on.
Sharks are not so obliging. They look angry all the time. They don't growl (at least not in a way that humans can hear). Their teeth are always visible. They stare at you with unblinking, soul-penetrating eyes. They barely even move when they swim, so you can't even fool yourself into thinking they're having a good time swimming around, the way you can with some other fish. They just glide and stare, glide and stare.
Unless you accidentally kick one with your fin.
Four of us went down on the dive into the tank. The other three were a guy from Johannesburg and two random kids. Before we went down, the divemaster told us that if we were lucky we might stumble upon a shark tooth, which we were welcome to take with us as a souvenir. This lead to my three dive mates spending nearly their entire time in the tank with their heads down to the floor, looking for teeth. Guys -- there plenty of shark teeth right above you...still in the sharks' mouths!
Anyway, I was kneeling on the floor looking up at two passing sharks. The guy from Johannesburg came swimming towards me with his head down, looking for teeth. He glanced up at me and I thought he'd like to know he was getting awfully close to a deadly predator, so I waved my hand in a downward motion. It was not a standard motion you use in diving communication, so he ignored me. He stuck his head down a bit further which meant his fins went up.
I could see he was going to kick the shark right in the side. There was nothing I could do. Grabbing him (the guy, not the shark) would have just startled him and possibly made the whole thing worse, and I couldn't exactly yell at him. My best option was to try to look like a piece of coral and see what happened.
So he kicked the shark.
What happened next took what felt like a tenth of a second. The shark whipped around to see what happened and whacked the shark next to it, which took off like a bullet and slammed into the side of the tank. The sound that made was incredible. I've never heard anything so loud under water. I've never seen anything move so quickly, either. I don't understand how they can propel themselves so quickly.
The guy from Johannesburg looked up, confused, having no idea what happened. When we surfaced I told him. "Oh," he said. "That could have been bad!"
I also swam with a couple turtles, several rays, and some very large, very ugly fish, among others.
There's something a little artificial about seeing all these fish in an aquarium tank, sure. It's a middle ground between being on the outside of the tank and being in the ocean. You're close enough to the wildlife to interact with them but it's more controlled than being truly out in the wild. It's sort of like being on safari in a national park like Kruger, which is a middle ground between a zoo and walking in the jungle.
Sort of like how Cape Town is a middle ground between Europe and what I've described in this blog as my perception of "real" Africa.
If you're a diver and have the opportunity to dive in an aquarium tank, I say it's worth it. I know one can dive at the Baltimore Aquarium...
When she finished, she held up a very small beaker in between her thumb and forefinger, no bigger than a shot glass, filled with what appeared to be water. "Now," she said. "Who is going to stick their finger in this beaker and have a taste?" She looked me dead in the eye.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I'll tell you afterwards."
Never one to turn down a snack, I stuck my finger in the beaker. Room temperature water. I slurped down the mystery drink. Salty water. Boo-ooring.
"So?" she asked. "Not so bad, right?"
"Saltwater?" I hoped.
She stuck the beaker under the microscope. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny fish were swimming furiously in all directions.
"Zooplankton!"
I considered all the teeny tiny bones and teeny tiny shells and teeny tiny bodies I had just ingested without any physical effort.
I felt like a zooplankton the following day as I sat on the floor of the predator tank, watching a shark swim toward me.
I've watched plenty of documentaries on sharks and I've seen them in aquariums but it wasn't until they were within arm's length, with no glass between us, that I realized why they are so menacing, perhaps more than many other predators. If you've ever seen a cat you know what sort of mood a lion is in. Same thing with dogs and hyenas. When elephants stick their ears out and make noise you know they're upset. Horses stomp around. Birds puff up their feathers. And so on.
Sharks are not so obliging. They look angry all the time. They don't growl (at least not in a way that humans can hear). Their teeth are always visible. They stare at you with unblinking, soul-penetrating eyes. They barely even move when they swim, so you can't even fool yourself into thinking they're having a good time swimming around, the way you can with some other fish. They just glide and stare, glide and stare.
Unless you accidentally kick one with your fin.
Four of us went down on the dive into the tank. The other three were a guy from Johannesburg and two random kids. Before we went down, the divemaster told us that if we were lucky we might stumble upon a shark tooth, which we were welcome to take with us as a souvenir. This lead to my three dive mates spending nearly their entire time in the tank with their heads down to the floor, looking for teeth. Guys -- there plenty of shark teeth right above you...still in the sharks' mouths!
Anyway, I was kneeling on the floor looking up at two passing sharks. The guy from Johannesburg came swimming towards me with his head down, looking for teeth. He glanced up at me and I thought he'd like to know he was getting awfully close to a deadly predator, so I waved my hand in a downward motion. It was not a standard motion you use in diving communication, so he ignored me. He stuck his head down a bit further which meant his fins went up.
I could see he was going to kick the shark right in the side. There was nothing I could do. Grabbing him (the guy, not the shark) would have just startled him and possibly made the whole thing worse, and I couldn't exactly yell at him. My best option was to try to look like a piece of coral and see what happened.
So he kicked the shark.
What happened next took what felt like a tenth of a second. The shark whipped around to see what happened and whacked the shark next to it, which took off like a bullet and slammed into the side of the tank. The sound that made was incredible. I've never heard anything so loud under water. I've never seen anything move so quickly, either. I don't understand how they can propel themselves so quickly.
The guy from Johannesburg looked up, confused, having no idea what happened. When we surfaced I told him. "Oh," he said. "That could have been bad!"
I also swam with a couple turtles, several rays, and some very large, very ugly fish, among others.
There's something a little artificial about seeing all these fish in an aquarium tank, sure. It's a middle ground between being on the outside of the tank and being in the ocean. You're close enough to the wildlife to interact with them but it's more controlled than being truly out in the wild. It's sort of like being on safari in a national park like Kruger, which is a middle ground between a zoo and walking in the jungle.
Sort of like how Cape Town is a middle ground between Europe and what I've described in this blog as my perception of "real" Africa.
If you're a diver and have the opportunity to dive in an aquarium tank, I say it's worth it. I know one can dive at the Baltimore Aquarium...
Monday, December 26, 2011
Aquarium and Table Mountain
Currently we are sitting outside at a cafe near our hotel, killing time before heading to back to the aquarium. We went to the aquarium yesterday because it was one of the very few things open on Christmas. We caught a penguin feeding and a shark feeding...sort of.
The penguins eagerly ate the fish tossed at them. Penguins look a little less cute and cuddly when they've splashed fish blood and guts on their chest.
The sharks are in the Predator Tank. The Predator Tank also is home to some large turtles, some huge fish I can't remember the name of, some rays, and a billion little fish. It's a big tank.
Two divers, dressed in a santa suit and an elf suit, descended in to the tank with boxes full of fish. They have to hand-feed the turtles because the turtles are too slow to naturally compete for food with the lightning-quick fish in the tank, and they need to hand-feed the the sharks to ensure the sharks know that they get their food from people and not by eating every other fish in the tank.
After gently tossing pieces of fish into the chomping mouths of the turtles, the divers tried to feed the sharks by shoving fish pierced on Titan-esque pitchforks into the sharks' mouth. The sharks weren't having it. Apparently they weren't hungry for their weekly feeding. The aquarium employee doing the presentation for the feeding apologized. There's nothing we can do, he said. I know you all came to see the sharks eat but if they don't eat they don't eat. Maybe they'll eat on Wednesday since they didn't eat today, so come back then. Oh but if you're a certified scuba diver, you can dive in the tank with the sharks if you want. See Guest Services.
Pretty much everything else in the city is closed today, we had no plans, and I don't think I use all of my fingers regularly anyway, so this afternoon I am diving in the Predator Tank. I will report on that later.
Table Mountain towers over Cape Town. It was recently voted onto the latest edition of the Natural Seven Wonders of the World list (or it made the final cut or it's being considered or something like that). They have signs all over the place urging people to vote. Anyway, it's a big mountain. Its flat top is about a kilometer above sea level. It's shaped like a table because when it was formed the rock rose straight up from the earth, as opposed to most mountains which splinter and spike and, well, look more like mountains.
On Friday I hiked up Table Mountain with four other people: two attorneys from LA (I traveled thousands of miles to hike a mountain with four people and half of them are attorneys? How far do I need to go to get away??) and two French girls. Our guide was a small Irish woman named Margaret. Margaret has been hiking Table Mountain every day for about 15 years. She is not to be messed with.
I asked her how she ended up a mountain climber. What does one do in a previous life that leads to climbing this mountain every day?
She tells me she was a speech therapist. Natural career progression, speech therapist to mountain climber.
Anyway, Margaret lead me, the two attorneys, and the French girls up and down the mountain in a little over 6 hours. (Pictures will come along later with the rest.) When we got to the top to the cableway station, where people who have taken the cable car are deposited, we found ourselves more or less alone on an empty mountain. The cableway had closed due to the wind so the only other people around were a few who had also hiked up. It was nice with no crowds.
I think I've found a new hobby. I hiked Masada in Israel and enjoyed that though it was a far different hike than Table Mountain. Masada was simply a dirt trail. Table Mountain was climbing over rocks and up ladders and jumping puddles. I'm going to check out the Appalachian and Shenandoah hiking scene when I get back. Maybe my thighs will have completely recovered by then.
Time to go meet the predators. And teach Mom how to use the camera.
The penguins eagerly ate the fish tossed at them. Penguins look a little less cute and cuddly when they've splashed fish blood and guts on their chest.
The sharks are in the Predator Tank. The Predator Tank also is home to some large turtles, some huge fish I can't remember the name of, some rays, and a billion little fish. It's a big tank.
Two divers, dressed in a santa suit and an elf suit, descended in to the tank with boxes full of fish. They have to hand-feed the turtles because the turtles are too slow to naturally compete for food with the lightning-quick fish in the tank, and they need to hand-feed the the sharks to ensure the sharks know that they get their food from people and not by eating every other fish in the tank.
After gently tossing pieces of fish into the chomping mouths of the turtles, the divers tried to feed the sharks by shoving fish pierced on Titan-esque pitchforks into the sharks' mouth. The sharks weren't having it. Apparently they weren't hungry for their weekly feeding. The aquarium employee doing the presentation for the feeding apologized. There's nothing we can do, he said. I know you all came to see the sharks eat but if they don't eat they don't eat. Maybe they'll eat on Wednesday since they didn't eat today, so come back then. Oh but if you're a certified scuba diver, you can dive in the tank with the sharks if you want. See Guest Services.
Pretty much everything else in the city is closed today, we had no plans, and I don't think I use all of my fingers regularly anyway, so this afternoon I am diving in the Predator Tank. I will report on that later.
Table Mountain towers over Cape Town. It was recently voted onto the latest edition of the Natural Seven Wonders of the World list (or it made the final cut or it's being considered or something like that). They have signs all over the place urging people to vote. Anyway, it's a big mountain. Its flat top is about a kilometer above sea level. It's shaped like a table because when it was formed the rock rose straight up from the earth, as opposed to most mountains which splinter and spike and, well, look more like mountains.
On Friday I hiked up Table Mountain with four other people: two attorneys from LA (I traveled thousands of miles to hike a mountain with four people and half of them are attorneys? How far do I need to go to get away??) and two French girls. Our guide was a small Irish woman named Margaret. Margaret has been hiking Table Mountain every day for about 15 years. She is not to be messed with.
I asked her how she ended up a mountain climber. What does one do in a previous life that leads to climbing this mountain every day?
She tells me she was a speech therapist. Natural career progression, speech therapist to mountain climber.
Anyway, Margaret lead me, the two attorneys, and the French girls up and down the mountain in a little over 6 hours. (Pictures will come along later with the rest.) When we got to the top to the cableway station, where people who have taken the cable car are deposited, we found ourselves more or less alone on an empty mountain. The cableway had closed due to the wind so the only other people around were a few who had also hiked up. It was nice with no crowds.
I think I've found a new hobby. I hiked Masada in Israel and enjoyed that though it was a far different hike than Table Mountain. Masada was simply a dirt trail. Table Mountain was climbing over rocks and up ladders and jumping puddles. I'm going to check out the Appalachian and Shenandoah hiking scene when I get back. Maybe my thighs will have completely recovered by then.
Time to go meet the predators. And teach Mom how to use the camera.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Where Am I?
(Note: this is today's second post. Scroll down to see the first.)
Although it had changed significantly since we were last there and I experienced the inner battle between my childhood memories and my active senses, Dakar was very familiar. The dirt hadn't changed, the vendors hadn't changed, the food hadn't changed. I was unsurprised when I turned a corner and the street was closed because there was a big hole in it, I was undisturbed by the goats wandering on the sidewalk, I was able to wave off vendors, I expected nothing to work or be on time. Basically, I expected Africa. And Africa is what I got.
South Africa is not the Africa I know. It does not feel the same here. Cape Town in particular feels like a European city. For one thing, there are white people everywhere, both tourists and residents. Everyone speaks English. There is reliable hot water. We haven't had a single power outage. The streets are largely devoid of trash. No wandering goats or cows. I haven't smelled any burning trash. No street vendors selling food. Wifi is everywhere. There is a huge waterfront mall and a Ritz and multimillion-dollar beach bungalows and Ferraris.
And it's not hot.
I'm not complaining. It just feels like I've been in Europe, that's all. On the drive between Joburg and Kruger I think I saw some real Africa, but not in the two cities we've been in. Maybe this impression is a reflection of the places we've been within the two cities but I don't think that's the whole story. Obviously the history of this country, particularly the big cities, has a huge impact on the culture and since the influence is European it makes sense that the feel is European. It's not a big mystery, it's just far more noticeable than I was expecting.
I suspect there is some real Africa in the townships. The townships are where the non-whites were displaced to after being ripped from their homes by Apartheid legislation, like the people from District Six.
From what I have seen from driving past, there is a spectrum of townships but they are essentially all the same: settlements created by the government consisting of little shacks with corrugated roofs clustered into depressed neighborhoods separated by tiny alleys passing as streets. Basically, slums for people who were forced from their real houses and real apartments in the city because of their skin color.
As a tourist you have the opportunity to go on a township tour where you are taken into a theoretically typical township house and meet a theoretically typical resident. You can talk to them and hear their story and see the squalor in which they live and tell them how awful and unfair it is (as if they don't know) and if you want to feel a little better about yourself you can give them some money (on top of their cut from your ticket). Some specialized tours focus on the music or food or sport of particular communities so that you can experience those aspects of township life for an evening before you return to the comfort of your hotel.
I was skeptical of the whole idea from the beginning and I am glad we've decided to skip it. You can make the argument that motivation for skipping it is simply a desire to avoid some sort of guilt or the inevitable awkwardness; that, in fact, visiting is a way of helping them, of putting money in their pocket, and by avoiding it entirely I am doing the worst thing possible which is ignoring it wholesale. I understand that argument.
But that is not my motivation. It just doesn't seem right to turn their actual lives into my discrete touristy outing. What can these people possibly be thinking when a tour bus pulls up and bunch of tourists pour out with their jewelry gleaming, sunglasses shining, and cameras clicking away?
I don't know if that image is necessarily the deal-breaker for me (though it does me of my trip to Morocco a couple years back when I was on that bus and cursed myself every day for it). I don't know if I would feel differently if instead of an organized tour I were simply going to meet a friend of a friend. Possibly. Lonely Planet claims some of the tours are tastefully done so I'm probably exaggerating an image I have no basis for painting in the first place.
You could also easily argue that any sort of traveling is experiencing someone else's life for your...something. Enjoyment, enlightenment, palette, photo album. Your new experience is someone else's reality. Nothing wrong with that, generally. That's traveling, without exception. Without exception.
But clearly I struggle with this. I honestly don't know why I have this line drawn in my mind, but it's there.
Although it had changed significantly since we were last there and I experienced the inner battle between my childhood memories and my active senses, Dakar was very familiar. The dirt hadn't changed, the vendors hadn't changed, the food hadn't changed. I was unsurprised when I turned a corner and the street was closed because there was a big hole in it, I was undisturbed by the goats wandering on the sidewalk, I was able to wave off vendors, I expected nothing to work or be on time. Basically, I expected Africa. And Africa is what I got.
South Africa is not the Africa I know. It does not feel the same here. Cape Town in particular feels like a European city. For one thing, there are white people everywhere, both tourists and residents. Everyone speaks English. There is reliable hot water. We haven't had a single power outage. The streets are largely devoid of trash. No wandering goats or cows. I haven't smelled any burning trash. No street vendors selling food. Wifi is everywhere. There is a huge waterfront mall and a Ritz and multimillion-dollar beach bungalows and Ferraris.
And it's not hot.
I'm not complaining. It just feels like I've been in Europe, that's all. On the drive between Joburg and Kruger I think I saw some real Africa, but not in the two cities we've been in. Maybe this impression is a reflection of the places we've been within the two cities but I don't think that's the whole story. Obviously the history of this country, particularly the big cities, has a huge impact on the culture and since the influence is European it makes sense that the feel is European. It's not a big mystery, it's just far more noticeable than I was expecting.
I suspect there is some real Africa in the townships. The townships are where the non-whites were displaced to after being ripped from their homes by Apartheid legislation, like the people from District Six.
From what I have seen from driving past, there is a spectrum of townships but they are essentially all the same: settlements created by the government consisting of little shacks with corrugated roofs clustered into depressed neighborhoods separated by tiny alleys passing as streets. Basically, slums for people who were forced from their real houses and real apartments in the city because of their skin color.
As a tourist you have the opportunity to go on a township tour where you are taken into a theoretically typical township house and meet a theoretically typical resident. You can talk to them and hear their story and see the squalor in which they live and tell them how awful and unfair it is (as if they don't know) and if you want to feel a little better about yourself you can give them some money (on top of their cut from your ticket). Some specialized tours focus on the music or food or sport of particular communities so that you can experience those aspects of township life for an evening before you return to the comfort of your hotel.
I was skeptical of the whole idea from the beginning and I am glad we've decided to skip it. You can make the argument that motivation for skipping it is simply a desire to avoid some sort of guilt or the inevitable awkwardness; that, in fact, visiting is a way of helping them, of putting money in their pocket, and by avoiding it entirely I am doing the worst thing possible which is ignoring it wholesale. I understand that argument.
But that is not my motivation. It just doesn't seem right to turn their actual lives into my discrete touristy outing. What can these people possibly be thinking when a tour bus pulls up and bunch of tourists pour out with their jewelry gleaming, sunglasses shining, and cameras clicking away?
I don't know if that image is necessarily the deal-breaker for me (though it does me of my trip to Morocco a couple years back when I was on that bus and cursed myself every day for it). I don't know if I would feel differently if instead of an organized tour I were simply going to meet a friend of a friend. Possibly. Lonely Planet claims some of the tours are tastefully done so I'm probably exaggerating an image I have no basis for painting in the first place.
You could also easily argue that any sort of traveling is experiencing someone else's life for your...something. Enjoyment, enlightenment, palette, photo album. Your new experience is someone else's reality. Nothing wrong with that, generally. That's traveling, without exception. Without exception.
But clearly I struggle with this. I honestly don't know why I have this line drawn in my mind, but it's there.
District Six
This morning I was scheduled to be attached to a paraglide so I could hurl myself off of Table Mountain. Bad weather was the forecast and thick gray clouds were sitting on the mountain when I woke up. (Cloud cover on Table Mountain is called the Table Cloth. Clever South Africans.) I called my paraglide guy to see what he thought. He assured me that a little overcast skies wouldn't hurt anyone.
"I'm not at the mountain yet but, you know, you never know, it could be fine."
Yeah, okay.
I decided that when I go I want the weather to be amazing, sort of like every other day we've had here. What's the point of soaring over the city when it's call gray and mopey? I told him I was going to postpone. He said he didn't blame me.
So that was that. How's that for anti-climactic.
I have heard a saying several times since we've been here: if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. Well, when we ventured out this morning it began to rain and many five minute segments later it had not stopped, as it rained most of the day. Luckily Cape Town has indoors among its mountains and beaches. We took cover in the District Six Museum.
District Six is a section of Cape Town that used to be a vibrant neighborhood, a melting pot of race and religion. By all accounts (that I have seen) it was full of hard-working people who had been there for generations, a true community in the shadow of "their" Table Mountain. It was the most cosmopolitan part of Cape Town and full of life, fueled by jazz musicians and traders.
Then Apartheid happened. District Six, targeted by the government because of its melting pot nature, was designated a White area in 1966. As a result, over a short period of time each of the approximately 70,000 residents of District Six were summarily kicked out of their homes and displaced to government-built shantytowns. In an attempt to erase all memory of the illegal racial mixing and peaceful cohabitation that had been happening there the government razed every last building to oblivion. The only building they left was a single church, which is still there.
The idea was that whites would move in to the vacated space that had been cleared for them. But they never did. Except for a few houses built within the last fifteen years, District Six is still a huge, empty, eerie lot in the middle of the city. The government has plans to rebuild it and move its former residents of 45 years ago back in but has been terribly lagging in its effort.
Anyway, there's a museum about it and it is outstanding. It's everything Robben Island is not. It's filled with photographs, interview excerpts, and narratives of and by the former residents. You learn about what life was like there before Apartheid, what the removal itself was like, and how life changed post-District Six both for the former residents and the city as a whole. One of the museum founders and a former resident acts as a curator. He gave a group of us a mini-tour and introduction. He was engaging and passionate, his talk was interesting, and his cell phone rang not once the whole time. I talked to him afterward and he answered all my questions. The District Six Museum is a superb experience.
After the museum we found lunch and took a little break. The rain also took a break and we went to the Gold of Africa museum, which is exactly what it sounds like: a history of goldsmithing in Africa. The gimmick is all the old gold stuff they have on display: gold tribal headdresses, gold jewelry, gold sword handles, gold figurines, gold shoes, gold mirrors, etc. Okay, okay, you can make stuff from gold, I get it. So that was that.
Then I had the first good cup of drip coffee I've had the entire time we've been in Africa. We've had plenty of good espresso but only drip coffee that could be mistaken for a) mud or b) dirty bath water.
Tomorrow we change hotels in the afternoon, moving us closer to the city center (or "centre" as they say in the metric system). In the morning I am hiking the mountain. Saturday we return to the food mecca of the Old Biscuit Mill, Sunday we are doing Christmas at the aquarium, Monday is up for grabs, Tuesday is diving with sharks, and Wednesday is run around and do all the last minute stuff before heading to the airport in the evening and buckling in for the 20-hour or so trip back. I can't believe the end is near.
"I'm not at the mountain yet but, you know, you never know, it could be fine."
Yeah, okay.
I decided that when I go I want the weather to be amazing, sort of like every other day we've had here. What's the point of soaring over the city when it's call gray and mopey? I told him I was going to postpone. He said he didn't blame me.
So that was that. How's that for anti-climactic.
I have heard a saying several times since we've been here: if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. Well, when we ventured out this morning it began to rain and many five minute segments later it had not stopped, as it rained most of the day. Luckily Cape Town has indoors among its mountains and beaches. We took cover in the District Six Museum.
District Six is a section of Cape Town that used to be a vibrant neighborhood, a melting pot of race and religion. By all accounts (that I have seen) it was full of hard-working people who had been there for generations, a true community in the shadow of "their" Table Mountain. It was the most cosmopolitan part of Cape Town and full of life, fueled by jazz musicians and traders.
Then Apartheid happened. District Six, targeted by the government because of its melting pot nature, was designated a White area in 1966. As a result, over a short period of time each of the approximately 70,000 residents of District Six were summarily kicked out of their homes and displaced to government-built shantytowns. In an attempt to erase all memory of the illegal racial mixing and peaceful cohabitation that had been happening there the government razed every last building to oblivion. The only building they left was a single church, which is still there.
The idea was that whites would move in to the vacated space that had been cleared for them. But they never did. Except for a few houses built within the last fifteen years, District Six is still a huge, empty, eerie lot in the middle of the city. The government has plans to rebuild it and move its former residents of 45 years ago back in but has been terribly lagging in its effort.
Anyway, there's a museum about it and it is outstanding. It's everything Robben Island is not. It's filled with photographs, interview excerpts, and narratives of and by the former residents. You learn about what life was like there before Apartheid, what the removal itself was like, and how life changed post-District Six both for the former residents and the city as a whole. One of the museum founders and a former resident acts as a curator. He gave a group of us a mini-tour and introduction. He was engaging and passionate, his talk was interesting, and his cell phone rang not once the whole time. I talked to him afterward and he answered all my questions. The District Six Museum is a superb experience.
After the museum we found lunch and took a little break. The rain also took a break and we went to the Gold of Africa museum, which is exactly what it sounds like: a history of goldsmithing in Africa. The gimmick is all the old gold stuff they have on display: gold tribal headdresses, gold jewelry, gold sword handles, gold figurines, gold shoes, gold mirrors, etc. Okay, okay, you can make stuff from gold, I get it. So that was that.
Then I had the first good cup of drip coffee I've had the entire time we've been in Africa. We've had plenty of good espresso but only drip coffee that could be mistaken for a) mud or b) dirty bath water.
Tomorrow we change hotels in the afternoon, moving us closer to the city center (or "centre" as they say in the metric system). In the morning I am hiking the mountain. Saturday we return to the food mecca of the Old Biscuit Mill, Sunday we are doing Christmas at the aquarium, Monday is up for grabs, Tuesday is diving with sharks, and Wednesday is run around and do all the last minute stuff before heading to the airport in the evening and buckling in for the 20-hour or so trip back. I can't believe the end is near.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Robben Island
I started today with a smoked crocodile tail sandwich. Number of times I have been able to say that previous to today: zero. Even better? The sandwich was called a "Croc monsieur."
Today we went to Robben Island. It was one of the worst experiences I have ever had as a tourist.
Robben Island is where the prison is that held the political prisoners of Apartheid, including Nelson Mandela. Especially Nelson Mandela.
Side-note: Mandela is a deity here. Pictures of him and quotes of his and celebrations of his forthcoming birthday are everywhere. He's on posters and T-shirts and coffee mugs and shot glasses and table clothes and postcards and rugs and window clings and rugby balls. Based on what I've seen he's inaugurated every building in the city.
Look, I understand the history. It's just that there comes a point when it begins to seem like propaganda. I don't think propaganda discriminates based on whether you agree with the message or not; propaganda is an overwhelming one-sided sensory overload celebrating a particular point of view. That is what Mandela is.
This is relevant to the story.
The dock at which you catch the ferry to Robben Island is at the Waterfront, a beautiful modern display of shops and restaurants. There is a visitors center where you go to line up to get on the ferry, etc. The visitors center has a gift shop. The gift shop was the first sign of trouble.
Robben Island is not a happy place and it does not have a happy history. It was the home of thousands of enemies of Apartheid who sacrificed their freedom in an effort to combat injustice. It has become a symbol of (as the gift shop's own merchandise states) the "triumph of the human spirit", or something like that.
I am not completely sure of the wording of the phrase. I would be completely sure if I had bought a calendar, magnet, bookmark, water bottle, necklace pendant, or picture frame with it inscribed, however. Luckily the gift shop sold them all!
In my view, the best item was a chess set. The Robben Island Political Chess Set. You got it: the whites against the blacks. Mandela as king, fist raised. Nothing like teaching the kids to appreciate history, right?
Downstairs as you wait to board the ferry you stand next to a large display explaining to you how horrible life at Robben Island was. This is a quote: "Prison conditions were hard. Treatment of prisoners inhumane....Political prisoners embarked on hunger strikes that pressured the prison authorities to introduce changes."
Hey Ma, can I get that on a T-shirt?!
Professional baseball teams use ridiculous gimmicks to bring fans to the park: T-shirt tosses, mascot races, stupid games, loud obnoxious music, the Dance Cam, etc. Though I hate these gimmicks with a passion, I understand from a business standpoint that teams need to make money (theoretically to sign good players to make the team successful, but that is for another time). Despite its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a designation for which I would guess it receives funding, I am sure whoever runs Robben Island needs to make money to pay the guides and maintenance and whatnot, sure.
But people would come anyway even if you doubled the price of admission. That would obviate the need to sell all the crap.
When you board the ferry there is a guy standing there urging families to walk the ramp together and pause long enough so that he can take your picture to sell to you when you get back. 95% of the people stopped and beamed at the camera for the shot. Fun family vacation! Okay kids, let's go learn about oppression! Hooray!
Once we got to the island we rode on a rushed bus tour and dropped at the prison building. About a hundred of us (way too large) were lead around by a former prisoner who seemed to have little interest in his own incredibly scripted presentation. His phone rang three times while he himself was speaking; he even answered it once! During his own tour. I cannot emphasize this enough.
This is a bit chicken or the egg, I admit, but the audience couldn't care less about what the guy said. Here we have an actual former prisoner telling us about his time spent on the island and the priority was getting a picture of your buddy flashing a peace sign in front of Mandela's cell?
It took about five minutes for me to want to leave as soon as possible. Fortunately the MO of the tour guide was to rush us through as quickly as he was able. We ended up spending more time on the ferry (an hour and a half) than on the tour (less than an hour).
The bit about Mandela was relevant because I am convinced that if Mandela's name were not able to be associated with the prison nobody would visit. The guide mentioned Mandela dozens of times. The phrase "Mandela and others" was stuck into every possible context. It's clear he is the moneymaker. Hardly any other names were mentioned.
With the incredible history at that island and the world-changing events that occurred there, the potential for education is obviously boundless. The fact that the events in question are so recent relative to "other history" increases its potential by a huge factor. The people who were imprisoned there are still living! Giving tours! This country is still dealing with the consequences of the actions that occurred here and there are important lessons to be learned. Stop screwing it up, already!
A couple years ago Mom and I went on a tour of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. More respect was paid on that tour to the perpetrators of actual crimes like murder and rape than was paid to the political prisoners of Robben Island. The Robben Island Museum and tour is a complete joke and a disservice.
Tomorrow, if the weather holds up, I will paraglide off of Table Mountain. Then the next day I will hike back up.
Today we went to Robben Island. It was one of the worst experiences I have ever had as a tourist.
Robben Island is where the prison is that held the political prisoners of Apartheid, including Nelson Mandela. Especially Nelson Mandela.
Side-note: Mandela is a deity here. Pictures of him and quotes of his and celebrations of his forthcoming birthday are everywhere. He's on posters and T-shirts and coffee mugs and shot glasses and table clothes and postcards and rugs and window clings and rugby balls. Based on what I've seen he's inaugurated every building in the city.
Look, I understand the history. It's just that there comes a point when it begins to seem like propaganda. I don't think propaganda discriminates based on whether you agree with the message or not; propaganda is an overwhelming one-sided sensory overload celebrating a particular point of view. That is what Mandela is.
This is relevant to the story.
The dock at which you catch the ferry to Robben Island is at the Waterfront, a beautiful modern display of shops and restaurants. There is a visitors center where you go to line up to get on the ferry, etc. The visitors center has a gift shop. The gift shop was the first sign of trouble.
Robben Island is not a happy place and it does not have a happy history. It was the home of thousands of enemies of Apartheid who sacrificed their freedom in an effort to combat injustice. It has become a symbol of (as the gift shop's own merchandise states) the "triumph of the human spirit", or something like that.
I am not completely sure of the wording of the phrase. I would be completely sure if I had bought a calendar, magnet, bookmark, water bottle, necklace pendant, or picture frame with it inscribed, however. Luckily the gift shop sold them all!
In my view, the best item was a chess set. The Robben Island Political Chess Set. You got it: the whites against the blacks. Mandela as king, fist raised. Nothing like teaching the kids to appreciate history, right?
Downstairs as you wait to board the ferry you stand next to a large display explaining to you how horrible life at Robben Island was. This is a quote: "Prison conditions were hard. Treatment of prisoners inhumane....Political prisoners embarked on hunger strikes that pressured the prison authorities to introduce changes."
Hey Ma, can I get that on a T-shirt?!
Professional baseball teams use ridiculous gimmicks to bring fans to the park: T-shirt tosses, mascot races, stupid games, loud obnoxious music, the Dance Cam, etc. Though I hate these gimmicks with a passion, I understand from a business standpoint that teams need to make money (theoretically to sign good players to make the team successful, but that is for another time). Despite its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a designation for which I would guess it receives funding, I am sure whoever runs Robben Island needs to make money to pay the guides and maintenance and whatnot, sure.
But people would come anyway even if you doubled the price of admission. That would obviate the need to sell all the crap.
When you board the ferry there is a guy standing there urging families to walk the ramp together and pause long enough so that he can take your picture to sell to you when you get back. 95% of the people stopped and beamed at the camera for the shot. Fun family vacation! Okay kids, let's go learn about oppression! Hooray!
Once we got to the island we rode on a rushed bus tour and dropped at the prison building. About a hundred of us (way too large) were lead around by a former prisoner who seemed to have little interest in his own incredibly scripted presentation. His phone rang three times while he himself was speaking; he even answered it once! During his own tour. I cannot emphasize this enough.
This is a bit chicken or the egg, I admit, but the audience couldn't care less about what the guy said. Here we have an actual former prisoner telling us about his time spent on the island and the priority was getting a picture of your buddy flashing a peace sign in front of Mandela's cell?
It took about five minutes for me to want to leave as soon as possible. Fortunately the MO of the tour guide was to rush us through as quickly as he was able. We ended up spending more time on the ferry (an hour and a half) than on the tour (less than an hour).
The bit about Mandela was relevant because I am convinced that if Mandela's name were not able to be associated with the prison nobody would visit. The guide mentioned Mandela dozens of times. The phrase "Mandela and others" was stuck into every possible context. It's clear he is the moneymaker. Hardly any other names were mentioned.
With the incredible history at that island and the world-changing events that occurred there, the potential for education is obviously boundless. The fact that the events in question are so recent relative to "other history" increases its potential by a huge factor. The people who were imprisoned there are still living! Giving tours! This country is still dealing with the consequences of the actions that occurred here and there are important lessons to be learned. Stop screwing it up, already!
A couple years ago Mom and I went on a tour of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. More respect was paid on that tour to the perpetrators of actual crimes like murder and rape than was paid to the political prisoners of Robben Island. The Robben Island Museum and tour is a complete joke and a disservice.
Tomorrow, if the weather holds up, I will paraglide off of Table Mountain. Then the next day I will hike back up.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Cape Town part one
Updating has been a struggle due to time. I guess in a way that's a good thing.
We have now been in Cape Town for 5 days. We've taken a hop-on hop-off bus tour, we've been to the Old Biscuit Mill, we've seen penguins, we've seen ostriches, we've been to the Cape of Good Hope, and I've driven on the left-hand side of the road without incident. We also have plans to go to Robben Island (both of us), paragliding (possibly both of us), hiking Table Mountain (one of us), diving with sharks (one of us), and going to the aquarium (both of us).
But one thing at a time.
The first full day we were here we went to the Old Biscuit Mill, which is like Eastern Market on steroids. It's similar to Eastern Market in the sense that it has arts and crafts-y stores and some clothing for sale and theoretically it's all independent and wholesome and cruelty-free and free-range and cancer-curing and all those other tricks that entice you to buy things. The way that it blows Eastern Market out of the water, not to mention any other farmer's market-type place I've ever seen, is the food.
There are a couple enormous tents devoted solely to food. The pictures I tweeted of a super thin pizza and a mushroom kebab were from this place, this small slice of heaven. There is Italian, Greek, omelets, veggies, barbecue, paella, beer, wine, dried fruits, olives, frozen yogurt, ice cream, baked goods galore, sandwiches of every kind, fresh fish, smoked fish, breads, potstickers, cheese, chocolate, smoothies, mojitos, mushrooms, jams and jellies, a raw bar, and even New York-style bagels. That's just what I can remember without thinking too hard about it. And everything is freshly made. I know this for a fact because a) you can watch most of it being made right in front of you if you're ordering a meal, and b) all the vendors have samples and I have opposable thumbs and a gullet.
The smells were amazing. I walked through in a daze before buying a local beer to help me begin to make decisions. I started with the grilled mushroom kebab, then split an arugula and prosciutto pizza with Mom. And a couple more beers. We are going back there this Saturday so that I can eat my way through the place. I was not properly prepared the first time around (I had eaten a large breakfast).
A quick word on food. Food here is remarkably cheap. I was told this on the front-end but didn't appreciate just how true it is. Cabs from the airport cost $40 but a smoked salmon omelet and a salad with a side of toast and jam and butter and a double espresso runs about $5. A glass of South African wine can be had for as little as $2 or so. Large avocados at the store are a dollar. I don't understand it but it turns out there are some things I simply don't need to understand.
Later that day (Saturday) we checked into our "self-catering" (which is an Afrikaans word for "dumpy") apartment, our home for six nights. It's in an area called Sea Point, which is allegedly the Jewish neighborhood but all we've seen here is halal eateries and Asian massage parlors. No matter. It's lively just enough at night, the cabs know where it is, and our apartment is a block from the water.
Sunday the hop-on hop-off took us around the city; pretty standard stuff. Castle here, World Cup stadium there, history of Apartheid oppression in that neighborhood, the beautiful people hang out at this beach here, etc. Good for getting the lay of the land and a little sunburnt. I'm always a little underwhelmed by these bus tours but also am always glad when I do them. They give you a little insight into how exactly the city you're in is laid out, which neighborhoods are worth returning to and which aren't worth the time. I should go on one in DC to see what a tourist hears from the authoritative bus voiceover.
Yesterday we took care of business: made hotel arrangements for the remainder of our stay after we're out of the current place, set up a car rental for today, and drank a lot of coffee. Productive if nothing else.
Today was the foray into driving. Mom and I agreed right away that I would drive and she would navigate. As a reminder, they drive on the left here in South Africa, which is the side I have never driven on before (intentionally). Also, the turn signal lever and the windshield wiper lever are swapped. Luckily the gas and brake are in the same place.
When we got into the car I made one small request.
"Just, before, you know, we get going here, ah, you know what would be helpful?" I asked cautiously.
"What?"
"Any sort of alarmed noises or frightened sounds coming from the passenger's seat," I suggested. "Those in fact do nothing but cause badness and harm."
"Oh yeah, I know. I'll try. I actually trust you a lot more to stay on the left than I do myself," she said, tightening her seat belt and finding a comfortable position for her hand on the oh-shit bar.
I nodded, flipped on the windshield wiper to indicate I was turning, and off we went.
We drove down to Boulders Beach and Foxy Beach, two beaches in a place called Simon's Town well-known for being places where penguins hang out.
As it turns out, that's pretty much all penguins do. They sit on the beach. They're kind of like the lions I described, only fatter, shinier, and much less graceful. They either sit in the sand camouflaged as globs of fat with beaks or they stand with their beaks pointed up into the air. Sometimes two of them will stand with their beaks pointed up into the air at each other, like swords on a coat of arms. And then they just stand. If the wind blows, they teeter. If they've gotten too hot or too cold or too teeter-tottery, they waddle, often falling flat on their face as they do, to a new spot to restart their activity of choice.
At one point I heard an over-enthusiastic dad tell his kid that penguins are "naturally curious" so don't be surprised if one "comes over to say hello." Nice try, over-enthusiastic dad. I've seen tumbleweeds with more natural curiosity than I saw in any of these penguins. That all being said, their general docility made them great photo subjects. That is until I got a picture of one standing and a picture of another one sitting, more or less exhausting the gamut of penguin activity.
On our way back to Cape Town we passed an ostrich farm, so we pulled over to have a look. The ostriches were separated into their own areas of farm, with quite a bit of room to run or sit or attempt to fly or rub two brain cells together or whatever it is ostriches do. As far as I can tell from the 10 minutes we spent there they spend their time trying to position themselves so they look like question marks and holding very disapproving facial expressions. And we saw one rolling around in the dirt.
In between the visits with flightless birds, we went to Cape Point, which is the southwestern southernmost tip of Africa (follow all that?). It's right around the corner from the Cape of Good Hope, which you've probably heard of. They're in the same huge national park which by the looks of it is at the end of the earth.
The thing to do at Cape Point is walk up the hill (or take the funicular, which didn't sound very "fun" to me, har har!) to a lighthouse at the highest point of the, uh, Point. Fantastic views.
I will actually do some more reflecting on this part of the journey later as it currently has become dinnertime. Tomorrow is Robben Island.
We have now been in Cape Town for 5 days. We've taken a hop-on hop-off bus tour, we've been to the Old Biscuit Mill, we've seen penguins, we've seen ostriches, we've been to the Cape of Good Hope, and I've driven on the left-hand side of the road without incident. We also have plans to go to Robben Island (both of us), paragliding (possibly both of us), hiking Table Mountain (one of us), diving with sharks (one of us), and going to the aquarium (both of us).
But one thing at a time.
The first full day we were here we went to the Old Biscuit Mill, which is like Eastern Market on steroids. It's similar to Eastern Market in the sense that it has arts and crafts-y stores and some clothing for sale and theoretically it's all independent and wholesome and cruelty-free and free-range and cancer-curing and all those other tricks that entice you to buy things. The way that it blows Eastern Market out of the water, not to mention any other farmer's market-type place I've ever seen, is the food.
There are a couple enormous tents devoted solely to food. The pictures I tweeted of a super thin pizza and a mushroom kebab were from this place, this small slice of heaven. There is Italian, Greek, omelets, veggies, barbecue, paella, beer, wine, dried fruits, olives, frozen yogurt, ice cream, baked goods galore, sandwiches of every kind, fresh fish, smoked fish, breads, potstickers, cheese, chocolate, smoothies, mojitos, mushrooms, jams and jellies, a raw bar, and even New York-style bagels. That's just what I can remember without thinking too hard about it. And everything is freshly made. I know this for a fact because a) you can watch most of it being made right in front of you if you're ordering a meal, and b) all the vendors have samples and I have opposable thumbs and a gullet.
The smells were amazing. I walked through in a daze before buying a local beer to help me begin to make decisions. I started with the grilled mushroom kebab, then split an arugula and prosciutto pizza with Mom. And a couple more beers. We are going back there this Saturday so that I can eat my way through the place. I was not properly prepared the first time around (I had eaten a large breakfast).
A quick word on food. Food here is remarkably cheap. I was told this on the front-end but didn't appreciate just how true it is. Cabs from the airport cost $40 but a smoked salmon omelet and a salad with a side of toast and jam and butter and a double espresso runs about $5. A glass of South African wine can be had for as little as $2 or so. Large avocados at the store are a dollar. I don't understand it but it turns out there are some things I simply don't need to understand.
Later that day (Saturday) we checked into our "self-catering" (which is an Afrikaans word for "dumpy") apartment, our home for six nights. It's in an area called Sea Point, which is allegedly the Jewish neighborhood but all we've seen here is halal eateries and Asian massage parlors. No matter. It's lively just enough at night, the cabs know where it is, and our apartment is a block from the water.
Sunday the hop-on hop-off took us around the city; pretty standard stuff. Castle here, World Cup stadium there, history of Apartheid oppression in that neighborhood, the beautiful people hang out at this beach here, etc. Good for getting the lay of the land and a little sunburnt. I'm always a little underwhelmed by these bus tours but also am always glad when I do them. They give you a little insight into how exactly the city you're in is laid out, which neighborhoods are worth returning to and which aren't worth the time. I should go on one in DC to see what a tourist hears from the authoritative bus voiceover.
Yesterday we took care of business: made hotel arrangements for the remainder of our stay after we're out of the current place, set up a car rental for today, and drank a lot of coffee. Productive if nothing else.
Today was the foray into driving. Mom and I agreed right away that I would drive and she would navigate. As a reminder, they drive on the left here in South Africa, which is the side I have never driven on before (intentionally). Also, the turn signal lever and the windshield wiper lever are swapped. Luckily the gas and brake are in the same place.
When we got into the car I made one small request.
"Just, before, you know, we get going here, ah, you know what would be helpful?" I asked cautiously.
"What?"
"Any sort of alarmed noises or frightened sounds coming from the passenger's seat," I suggested. "Those in fact do nothing but cause badness and harm."
"Oh yeah, I know. I'll try. I actually trust you a lot more to stay on the left than I do myself," she said, tightening her seat belt and finding a comfortable position for her hand on the oh-shit bar.
I nodded, flipped on the windshield wiper to indicate I was turning, and off we went.
We drove down to Boulders Beach and Foxy Beach, two beaches in a place called Simon's Town well-known for being places where penguins hang out.
As it turns out, that's pretty much all penguins do. They sit on the beach. They're kind of like the lions I described, only fatter, shinier, and much less graceful. They either sit in the sand camouflaged as globs of fat with beaks or they stand with their beaks pointed up into the air. Sometimes two of them will stand with their beaks pointed up into the air at each other, like swords on a coat of arms. And then they just stand. If the wind blows, they teeter. If they've gotten too hot or too cold or too teeter-tottery, they waddle, often falling flat on their face as they do, to a new spot to restart their activity of choice.
At one point I heard an over-enthusiastic dad tell his kid that penguins are "naturally curious" so don't be surprised if one "comes over to say hello." Nice try, over-enthusiastic dad. I've seen tumbleweeds with more natural curiosity than I saw in any of these penguins. That all being said, their general docility made them great photo subjects. That is until I got a picture of one standing and a picture of another one sitting, more or less exhausting the gamut of penguin activity.
On our way back to Cape Town we passed an ostrich farm, so we pulled over to have a look. The ostriches were separated into their own areas of farm, with quite a bit of room to run or sit or attempt to fly or rub two brain cells together or whatever it is ostriches do. As far as I can tell from the 10 minutes we spent there they spend their time trying to position themselves so they look like question marks and holding very disapproving facial expressions. And we saw one rolling around in the dirt.
In between the visits with flightless birds, we went to Cape Point, which is the southwestern southernmost tip of Africa (follow all that?). It's right around the corner from the Cape of Good Hope, which you've probably heard of. They're in the same huge national park which by the looks of it is at the end of the earth.
The thing to do at Cape Point is walk up the hill (or take the funicular, which didn't sound very "fun" to me, har har!) to a lighthouse at the highest point of the, uh, Point. Fantastic views.
I will actually do some more reflecting on this part of the journey later as it currently has become dinnertime. Tomorrow is Robben Island.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Return from the animal kingdom
All limbs accounted for. No stowaways in any luggage. Many, many pictures taken. Success.
On the 12-hour trip back to Johannesburg I thought at length about how I was going to write about the safari, particularly without the aid of pictures. Unfortunately I can't put the pictures online at the moment due to lack of reliable speedy internet so I will try to describe parts of the experience that involved senses that are not sight.
We went to Kruger Park. It is a national park about four and a half hours east of Johannesburg (or twelve, depending on how you drive -- more on that later). It is huge, roughly the size of Israel (or New Jersey -- pick your reference point). It is famous for being so big and having plenty of animals, specifically the Big Five: lion, rhino, elephant, water buffalo, and leopard. Whether or not you know it when you enter, your goal is to see these five. It's all the guides focus on and all anyone talks about. Which of the five have you seen? What are you looking for today, what's left on your list? Can I count seeing a rhino if I didn't see its horn? A hippo is kind of shaped like a rhino, can I count that?
Yes, Mom and I saw all five. We were extremely fortunate to see a leopard on our first day, which is the one of the five that eludes most frequently and was the bane of checklists throughout our group. Due to our late arrival (see previous post), Mom and I went on a later game drive on our first day than we were originally scheduled for and it was on that drive that we saw the leopard. He was just sitting on the side of the road as if he knew he was in the spotlight. There were four or five vehicles there full of people looking at him and he just didn't care. He posed and posed and finally sauntered off into the bush when he was done basking. It was stunning and remarkable in and of itself but it became even more so as the days went by and the others in our group (none of whom went on that particular drive because they had arrived on time) continued to pine after the leopard and its elusiveness became even more apparent.
I have a great picture that I'll have to wait to put up.
The scarcity of the leopard and the infrequency of the lion and rhino had a noticeable effect on many of us and our appreciation for the more common animals. This was particularly true, I think, with the elephant. Though it is one of the big five, the abundance of the elephant rendered it downright ordinary by the end of our stay. I'm ashamed to say that this morning on our final drive I had to keep reminding myself that I am looking at an ELEPHANT and it is RIGHT THERE. I mean look at it! It uses its nose as an arm and it's tearing bark off a tree to eat like a cracker. This is not TV and I will not see this again any time soon. There's an elephant. AN ELEPHANT. I mean, I can smell it. No, really.
To be fair, Kruger has so many elephants that they will soon have to be "culled", as we were told. They are eating too many trees. And I wasn't alone. The general reaction, even before the last drive, was similar to mine. Elephant? Please. Do you have any idea how many elephants I have seen? I have plenty of pictures of Dumbo, thanks. Oh it's tap dancing? Yawn. Wake me when it's fighting a baboon.
The poor impala were even worse in terms of abundance. There are impala and their ilk (elk?) everywhere. The guide told us the impala are referred to as the McDonald's of the park: they're everywhere you look. All different sizes and patterns and horns and leaping ability, all over the place. They're like squirrels.
I did have an experience with the impala that I didn't have with any other animal, nor any other animal I have seen in my entire life.
Cured meat (jerky) is popular here and they call it biltong. I don't know what that means but they make it out of all kinds of animals. I also don't know if it's different than jerky you'd find anywhere else but since it's a local thing I wanted to try it. I bought some beef biltong in a convenience store in the park and really liked it. Another store we went to had a big variety pack: biltong of six different animals! Of course I bought it.
Kudu is a type of impala that are found in the park. They're not the most common type but we saw plenty of them. They're big and have stripes.
Kudu biltong was the first bag in my variety pack.
Jerky is tasty, bite-sized, and high in protein and calories. In other words, a perfect snack on a 4 hour drive. It's like meat granola.
So for the first time in my life I found myself chewing an animal while watching at its brethren graze right in front of me. It was a little strange but not enough to stop eating. Kudu biltong is pretty good as it turns out.
I have a new appreciation for giraffes (and no, I did not eat any). They are really, really big. I had seen them on TV of course, stretching their very long necks to eat from those very high trees. I may have even seen one in a zoo in a very tall cage. But seeing them in person not in a cage was (for some reason more) astounding. The males are on average 5.2 meters tall, which is metric for "unimaginably tall." They are the skyscrapers of the animal kingdom. And when you look at one dead-on you can see that they're bowlegged, which makes them look incredibly awkward. I learned on this trip that I often don't understand evolution.
Rhinos are bastards. They stand just the right distance from the road that they are hard to find but not so hard that you just give up all hope like you do with the leopard (or cheetah, of which we saw absolutely zero). Then, when you do find a rhino, he is positioned in such a way that his defining and magnificent feature, his horn, is hidden behind the one rock in the entire field in which he is standing. You can wait and wait and wait until the kudus come home and the rhino will not show you his horn so you can take your stupid picture and be sure that he is not a hippo. It is so very frustrating.
Hippos are equally uncooperative when it comes to appearing all at once. They also like to hide their heads behind rocks or trees when they are out of the water. When they are in the water they show only their eyes and ears. The luck of the leopard sighting worked its magic for us once with a hippo: we saw a hippo running. I don't know if you can find that on YouTube somewhere but I encourage you to make a point of seeing a hippo run, be it on video or in person. If you can imagine a watermelon running on toothpick legs you have a good idea of what it looks like.
I had real mixed feelings about the lions. I honestly didn't expect to see a lioness hunting or a lion fighting a buffalo. I have seen lions at the zoo. They sit around. They're just cats and cats just sit around.
Don't get me wrong, I love cats. I had cats growing up. I think it was the fact that many of the other animals are truly bizarre that made the lions seem normal. The elephant has a truly crazy appendage in its trunk, the rhino has its prehistoric horn, the giraffe its neck and size, the hippo its unwieldy shape and cumbersome size and its ridiculous face, the zebra and its stripes that are unlike the markings of any other animal.
The lion is a cat. A very big, very strong, very loud cat, yes. But relative to the curious and wondrous features of the other animals that are so unlike anything else I see on a regular basis, the lions were downright normal. I know: king of the jungle, etc. I'm not saying they weren't cool, but a couple of the ones we saw flopped over on their backs like they wanted their tummies scratched, for crying out loud.
Yes I got pictures of that.
I give the leopard more credit because of its beautiful and unique spots.
I have gone and done exactly what I said I wouldn't do, which is describe what I saw. I guess I can't help it. The whole experience was a visual smorgasbord.
So we are in Johannesburg until Friday when we head to Cape Town. We're in a hotel tonight and staying with friends tomorrow. Lots of moving around in the past week or so. Cape Town will be a welcome change, where we plan on getting an apartment-type place with a kitchen. Hopefully being in one place for six or seven days will give us a chance to unpack totally, have a little stability, a little routine, and generally calm down.
More regular posting forthcoming with reintroduction of consistent internet access. And maybe a couple pictures.
On the 12-hour trip back to Johannesburg I thought at length about how I was going to write about the safari, particularly without the aid of pictures. Unfortunately I can't put the pictures online at the moment due to lack of reliable speedy internet so I will try to describe parts of the experience that involved senses that are not sight.
We went to Kruger Park. It is a national park about four and a half hours east of Johannesburg (or twelve, depending on how you drive -- more on that later). It is huge, roughly the size of Israel (or New Jersey -- pick your reference point). It is famous for being so big and having plenty of animals, specifically the Big Five: lion, rhino, elephant, water buffalo, and leopard. Whether or not you know it when you enter, your goal is to see these five. It's all the guides focus on and all anyone talks about. Which of the five have you seen? What are you looking for today, what's left on your list? Can I count seeing a rhino if I didn't see its horn? A hippo is kind of shaped like a rhino, can I count that?
Yes, Mom and I saw all five. We were extremely fortunate to see a leopard on our first day, which is the one of the five that eludes most frequently and was the bane of checklists throughout our group. Due to our late arrival (see previous post), Mom and I went on a later game drive on our first day than we were originally scheduled for and it was on that drive that we saw the leopard. He was just sitting on the side of the road as if he knew he was in the spotlight. There were four or five vehicles there full of people looking at him and he just didn't care. He posed and posed and finally sauntered off into the bush when he was done basking. It was stunning and remarkable in and of itself but it became even more so as the days went by and the others in our group (none of whom went on that particular drive because they had arrived on time) continued to pine after the leopard and its elusiveness became even more apparent.
I have a great picture that I'll have to wait to put up.
The scarcity of the leopard and the infrequency of the lion and rhino had a noticeable effect on many of us and our appreciation for the more common animals. This was particularly true, I think, with the elephant. Though it is one of the big five, the abundance of the elephant rendered it downright ordinary by the end of our stay. I'm ashamed to say that this morning on our final drive I had to keep reminding myself that I am looking at an ELEPHANT and it is RIGHT THERE. I mean look at it! It uses its nose as an arm and it's tearing bark off a tree to eat like a cracker. This is not TV and I will not see this again any time soon. There's an elephant. AN ELEPHANT. I mean, I can smell it. No, really.
To be fair, Kruger has so many elephants that they will soon have to be "culled", as we were told. They are eating too many trees. And I wasn't alone. The general reaction, even before the last drive, was similar to mine. Elephant? Please. Do you have any idea how many elephants I have seen? I have plenty of pictures of Dumbo, thanks. Oh it's tap dancing? Yawn. Wake me when it's fighting a baboon.
The poor impala were even worse in terms of abundance. There are impala and their ilk (elk?) everywhere. The guide told us the impala are referred to as the McDonald's of the park: they're everywhere you look. All different sizes and patterns and horns and leaping ability, all over the place. They're like squirrels.
I did have an experience with the impala that I didn't have with any other animal, nor any other animal I have seen in my entire life.
Cured meat (jerky) is popular here and they call it biltong. I don't know what that means but they make it out of all kinds of animals. I also don't know if it's different than jerky you'd find anywhere else but since it's a local thing I wanted to try it. I bought some beef biltong in a convenience store in the park and really liked it. Another store we went to had a big variety pack: biltong of six different animals! Of course I bought it.
Kudu is a type of impala that are found in the park. They're not the most common type but we saw plenty of them. They're big and have stripes.
Kudu biltong was the first bag in my variety pack.
Jerky is tasty, bite-sized, and high in protein and calories. In other words, a perfect snack on a 4 hour drive. It's like meat granola.
So for the first time in my life I found myself chewing an animal while watching at its brethren graze right in front of me. It was a little strange but not enough to stop eating. Kudu biltong is pretty good as it turns out.
I have a new appreciation for giraffes (and no, I did not eat any). They are really, really big. I had seen them on TV of course, stretching their very long necks to eat from those very high trees. I may have even seen one in a zoo in a very tall cage. But seeing them in person not in a cage was (for some reason more) astounding. The males are on average 5.2 meters tall, which is metric for "unimaginably tall." They are the skyscrapers of the animal kingdom. And when you look at one dead-on you can see that they're bowlegged, which makes them look incredibly awkward. I learned on this trip that I often don't understand evolution.
Rhinos are bastards. They stand just the right distance from the road that they are hard to find but not so hard that you just give up all hope like you do with the leopard (or cheetah, of which we saw absolutely zero). Then, when you do find a rhino, he is positioned in such a way that his defining and magnificent feature, his horn, is hidden behind the one rock in the entire field in which he is standing. You can wait and wait and wait until the kudus come home and the rhino will not show you his horn so you can take your stupid picture and be sure that he is not a hippo. It is so very frustrating.
Hippos are equally uncooperative when it comes to appearing all at once. They also like to hide their heads behind rocks or trees when they are out of the water. When they are in the water they show only their eyes and ears. The luck of the leopard sighting worked its magic for us once with a hippo: we saw a hippo running. I don't know if you can find that on YouTube somewhere but I encourage you to make a point of seeing a hippo run, be it on video or in person. If you can imagine a watermelon running on toothpick legs you have a good idea of what it looks like.
I had real mixed feelings about the lions. I honestly didn't expect to see a lioness hunting or a lion fighting a buffalo. I have seen lions at the zoo. They sit around. They're just cats and cats just sit around.
Don't get me wrong, I love cats. I had cats growing up. I think it was the fact that many of the other animals are truly bizarre that made the lions seem normal. The elephant has a truly crazy appendage in its trunk, the rhino has its prehistoric horn, the giraffe its neck and size, the hippo its unwieldy shape and cumbersome size and its ridiculous face, the zebra and its stripes that are unlike the markings of any other animal.
The lion is a cat. A very big, very strong, very loud cat, yes. But relative to the curious and wondrous features of the other animals that are so unlike anything else I see on a regular basis, the lions were downright normal. I know: king of the jungle, etc. I'm not saying they weren't cool, but a couple of the ones we saw flopped over on their backs like they wanted their tummies scratched, for crying out loud.
Yes I got pictures of that.
I give the leopard more credit because of its beautiful and unique spots.
I have gone and done exactly what I said I wouldn't do, which is describe what I saw. I guess I can't help it. The whole experience was a visual smorgasbord.
So we are in Johannesburg until Friday when we head to Cape Town. We're in a hotel tonight and staying with friends tomorrow. Lots of moving around in the past week or so. Cape Town will be a welcome change, where we plan on getting an apartment-type place with a kitchen. Hopefully being in one place for six or seven days will give us a chance to unpack totally, have a little stability, a little routine, and generally calm down.
More regular posting forthcoming with reintroduction of consistent internet access. And maybe a couple pictures.
Lost post
This is an obviously bitter post I wrote several days ago. I am writing an update right now but this will give a little background for the present.
Sunday December 11, 8:55am, somewhere near Johannesburg
(I am going to begin time and place-stamping posts as I write them because I don't know when I'll be able to put them online.)
So I've lost track of the days. I also can't remember what I've posted and what I've tweeted, so here's a brief recap through right this moment.
To make a real long story very short, we were supposed to leave Dakar early Thursday morning but after two flight cancellations didn't leave until Friday night, and arrived in Johannesburg Saturday morning. Ordinarily just annoying, this 36+ hour delay was problematic because we had hotel reservations in Johannesburg and were supposed to leave get picked up to go on the safari trip on Friday morning.
I emailed the safari people at various times and they got in touch with the hotel and all was good, they said.
This morning the van to take us to the safari came to our hotel to pick us up. Finally, we're on our way. We have a game drive this afternoon, we'll see some animals, have some dinner, great.
There are two people in the van when it gets us. With the four of us, there's room for five more. The driver says we're just going to pick up four more people and we'll be on our way. Great.
We stop at a lodge. Two people get on, then a third. I can hear them talking about another guy they're expecting. That makes four. Then we'll be full and on our way. Great.
Another van shows up. Three people get out. They look confused. The driver looks confused. Some guy with a name tag comes out of the lodge and he looks confused.
Mom quietly says: "I wonder if this is because we..."
I hiss at her: "Admit nothing and deny everything!"
The guy with the name tag is walking back and forth between the lodge and the van. Now he's on the phone.
He comes back to the van and opens the door. I sit very still and try to blend into the seat.
"So, yeah, who are the Robinsons?"
Crap.
So they kicked us off the van and now we're sitting on the porch of this lodge. Apparently someone is on their way to come get us. He should be here in 20 minutes or so, which will be 9:30. It's a six hour drive at least, which means earliest arrival is 3:30. The game drive this afternoon leaves right around then. The guy with the name tag said they are going to try their darndest to get us on the drive but frankly I am confident that will not happen.
Sunday December 11, 8:55am, somewhere near Johannesburg
(I am going to begin time and place-stamping posts as I write them because I don't know when I'll be able to put them online.)
So I've lost track of the days. I also can't remember what I've posted and what I've tweeted, so here's a brief recap through right this moment.
To make a real long story very short, we were supposed to leave Dakar early Thursday morning but after two flight cancellations didn't leave until Friday night, and arrived in Johannesburg Saturday morning. Ordinarily just annoying, this 36+ hour delay was problematic because we had hotel reservations in Johannesburg and were supposed to leave get picked up to go on the safari trip on Friday morning.
I emailed the safari people at various times and they got in touch with the hotel and all was good, they said.
This morning the van to take us to the safari came to our hotel to pick us up. Finally, we're on our way. We have a game drive this afternoon, we'll see some animals, have some dinner, great.
There are two people in the van when it gets us. With the four of us, there's room for five more. The driver says we're just going to pick up four more people and we'll be on our way. Great.
We stop at a lodge. Two people get on, then a third. I can hear them talking about another guy they're expecting. That makes four. Then we'll be full and on our way. Great.
Another van shows up. Three people get out. They look confused. The driver looks confused. Some guy with a name tag comes out of the lodge and he looks confused.
Mom quietly says: "I wonder if this is because we..."
I hiss at her: "Admit nothing and deny everything!"
The guy with the name tag is walking back and forth between the lodge and the van. Now he's on the phone.
He comes back to the van and opens the door. I sit very still and try to blend into the seat.
"So, yeah, who are the Robinsons?"
Crap.
So they kicked us off the van and now we're sitting on the porch of this lodge. Apparently someone is on their way to come get us. He should be here in 20 minutes or so, which will be 9:30. It's a six hour drive at least, which means earliest arrival is 3:30. The game drive this afternoon leaves right around then. The guy with the name tag said they are going to try their darndest to get us on the drive but frankly I am confident that will not happen.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Day nine
Every time I am ready to publish a post on this blog, I click on the preview button to be sure that when I do publish, the post looks how I expect it to look. Once I am happy with the preview, I click publish and voila.
Several hours ago I wrote a post about how our flight from Dakar to Johannesburg had been "delayed" 24 hours because the incoming flight from DC had been "delayed" (read: cancelled). Annoying, but just a small speed bump. The next plane had taken off, it would land, we would get on it, and everything would be dandy, just a day later than expected.
I clicked preview. Everything looked ready. Just need to click on publish, now. Where's that button...ah, there it is...
Ring ring. My hotel room telephone. Never a good thing to hear when you think everything is back on schedule. No one ever calls you to tell you things are going well.
Turns out the next plane had in fact not taken off. It was going to be at least a couple hours late. We'll know within two hours what the deal is.
Well that was 4 and a half hours ago. As you can see, I never clicked on publish on that first post.
The flight that was to arrive this morning and pick us up has been cancelled. According to the flight tracker website, the flight that is to arrive tomorrow has also been cancelled already, but who knows what's true. So we're heading down to breakfast to see if there's any news and to ponder.
At this rate all the animals we're hoping to see on safari will have evolved by the time we get there. I hope I can still recognize at least some of them.
Thank you to everyone who has sent me well wishes for the trip and encouragement about the whole blogging thing.
Several hours ago I wrote a post about how our flight from Dakar to Johannesburg had been "delayed" 24 hours because the incoming flight from DC had been "delayed" (read: cancelled). Annoying, but just a small speed bump. The next plane had taken off, it would land, we would get on it, and everything would be dandy, just a day later than expected.
I clicked preview. Everything looked ready. Just need to click on publish, now. Where's that button...ah, there it is...
Ring ring. My hotel room telephone. Never a good thing to hear when you think everything is back on schedule. No one ever calls you to tell you things are going well.
Turns out the next plane had in fact not taken off. It was going to be at least a couple hours late. We'll know within two hours what the deal is.
Well that was 4 and a half hours ago. As you can see, I never clicked on publish on that first post.
The flight that was to arrive this morning and pick us up has been cancelled. According to the flight tracker website, the flight that is to arrive tomorrow has also been cancelled already, but who knows what's true. So we're heading down to breakfast to see if there's any news and to ponder.
At this rate all the animals we're hoping to see on safari will have evolved by the time we get there. I hope I can still recognize at least some of them.
Thank you to everyone who has sent me well wishes for the trip and encouragement about the whole blogging thing.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Day six
Our plan for tomorrow includes doing a little bit of le shopping which means spending hours locking horns with determined tablecloth hawkers. We needed today to be a day away from the market and the general mayhem that is the downtown area where our hotel is to mentally and emotionally prepare for tomorrow's battles over prices.
We took a taxi to a part of town called Point E to just wander around with the ultimate goal of eventually finding a restaurant I head read about online.
My impression is that Point E is more calm than downtown is on any given day anyway but today was particularly quiet. Today is the first day of the Muslim new year so many businesses were closed, as was the university. Further, one of the large roads running alongside the neighborhood is closed for construction so there were no cars for a good part of it. I saw no other tourists. It's definitely not a touristy part of town. The looks I got from some of the locals told me they were surprised to see us. A very different feel than downtown, where one is routinely accosted with cell phone charges, calling cards, etc.
I had fallen behind a little because I had stopped to take a picture of something. When I lowered my camera there was a guy walking towards me on the sidewalk. I stopped to let him by and he stopped. He said hello in French and I said hello in French. He asked in French if I was a tourist and in French I said sort of. Then he asked me in Spanish if I speak Spanish. I said no. Then he asked in French if I speak French and in French I said sort of. Then he asked in French if I speak English and in English I said yes. Then I asked him in French if he speaks Spanish and he said yes in Spanish. Then I asked him in English if he speaks English and in French he said sort of.
He ended up walking with us for a while and joining us for a drink and a chat. He then walked around the neighborhood with us trying to find the restaurant but to no avail. We finally gave up and caught a cab back to the hotel. Before we did, I asked the guy, Cherif, for his email address. He said he didn't have one. I gave him mine and told him to go get his own and email me. We also exchanged phone numbers. I'm not sure why because international texting is expensive and anyone who knows me knows I use my phone for anything but phone calls. I half expect my phone to ring in six months and it will be him, asking me to show him around DC. That would be pretty cool.
Lunch, rest, evening promenade, dinner. Easy day. To the marché tomorrow. I have two friends I promised I would visit, Mwaz and, uh, the other guy. I can't remember exactly where his stand is but I'm sure he'll find me.
Thursday Mom and I leave for Johannesburg. That's another 8 hour flight. I will spend several of those hours choosing and prepping pictures for uploading when I have a more reliable internet connection. I'll also write a bunch of tangential, unrelated posts for uploading when we land if the hotel in Johannesburg has internet. That's the other thing: tomorrow might be the last post for a while until after the safari because I'm not sure when we'll have internet and when we won't. I'll try to find out ahead of time so that I can warn you. That way you won't think I was eaten by a lion or a hippo. If I do end up being eaten by a lion or a hippo I'll try to get some good pictures.
We took a taxi to a part of town called Point E to just wander around with the ultimate goal of eventually finding a restaurant I head read about online.
My impression is that Point E is more calm than downtown is on any given day anyway but today was particularly quiet. Today is the first day of the Muslim new year so many businesses were closed, as was the university. Further, one of the large roads running alongside the neighborhood is closed for construction so there were no cars for a good part of it. I saw no other tourists. It's definitely not a touristy part of town. The looks I got from some of the locals told me they were surprised to see us. A very different feel than downtown, where one is routinely accosted with cell phone charges, calling cards, etc.
I had fallen behind a little because I had stopped to take a picture of something. When I lowered my camera there was a guy walking towards me on the sidewalk. I stopped to let him by and he stopped. He said hello in French and I said hello in French. He asked in French if I was a tourist and in French I said sort of. Then he asked me in Spanish if I speak Spanish. I said no. Then he asked in French if I speak French and in French I said sort of. Then he asked in French if I speak English and in English I said yes. Then I asked him in French if he speaks Spanish and he said yes in Spanish. Then I asked him in English if he speaks English and in French he said sort of.
He ended up walking with us for a while and joining us for a drink and a chat. He then walked around the neighborhood with us trying to find the restaurant but to no avail. We finally gave up and caught a cab back to the hotel. Before we did, I asked the guy, Cherif, for his email address. He said he didn't have one. I gave him mine and told him to go get his own and email me. We also exchanged phone numbers. I'm not sure why because international texting is expensive and anyone who knows me knows I use my phone for anything but phone calls. I half expect my phone to ring in six months and it will be him, asking me to show him around DC. That would be pretty cool.
Lunch, rest, evening promenade, dinner. Easy day. To the marché tomorrow. I have two friends I promised I would visit, Mwaz and, uh, the other guy. I can't remember exactly where his stand is but I'm sure he'll find me.
Thursday Mom and I leave for Johannesburg. That's another 8 hour flight. I will spend several of those hours choosing and prepping pictures for uploading when I have a more reliable internet connection. I'll also write a bunch of tangential, unrelated posts for uploading when we land if the hotel in Johannesburg has internet. That's the other thing: tomorrow might be the last post for a while until after the safari because I'm not sure when we'll have internet and when we won't. I'll try to find out ahead of time so that I can warn you. That way you won't think I was eaten by a lion or a hippo. If I do end up being eaten by a lion or a hippo I'll try to get some good pictures.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Day five
Today was time travel day.
A couple days ago Mom asked the guy at the hotel desk if he could arrange a taxi to be at our service for a few hours so we could tour around and see some old stomping grounds. He said he just happens to have a friend who could do just that! Imagine the odds.
Mor is the cabbie's name, and he picked us up from the hotel at 10 this morning. His cab is impressive mostly in the sense that the doors don't require any tricks to open (the day we got here my door couldn't be opened from the inside and on a later trip the driver's door couldn't be opened from the outside so I had to open it for him -- I kid you not) and none of his tires were flat (apparently not a requirement).
First stop: our old house. To get there we took a road called the Corniche. It looks like a divided highway but it's really just a big city road, maybe closer to a boulevard. It runs NW-SE along the water on the west side of the city. When we lived here the Corniche would take you to a point where there was not much built up. There was not much built up around our house.
How things change. There is construction everywhere. New buildings everywhere, many more cars than there used to be, more people. Mom was trying to direct Mor to where the house was but got lost in all the new development because she couldn't recognize any of the old hidden among the new, if the old even still existed. Before we knew it we were up by the school.
New first stop: our old school. The International School of Dakar.
As I mentioned yesterday, I don't have all too many memories of Dakar, especially when compared with Abidjan. The school is something I have clear memories of. (We lived in Dakar when I was between ages 3 and 7, which is too young for school through the middle of second grade.) I remember my teachers and some of my friends and what stuff looked like and where stuff was.
The first challenge to my memory was what stuff looks like. The school has beefed up its security in the form of a more substantial gate. There's a whole village of high-rise apartments across the little dirt road from the front gate that wasn't there before. The road we used to take to get to the school was no longer accessible. That was just the exterior changes.
Walking through the gate and clearly seeing the school building and the field is not easy to describe, so bear with me. They didn't tear the place down and rebuild it. They didn't turn the building around or replace the field with an ice skating rink. The building is still where it's supposed to be and so is the field; the skeleton is in place. There was no mistaking where I was.
But my memory was under assault. I was battling three memory reconciliations: the way things naturally change over time; the way your perception of size changes over time as the subject of your memory stayed the same size but you have grown; and my own self-doubt concerning the reliability of the memory of a 7-year old.
Here's what I remember. The building was in an L shape. Fitting into the corner of the L like a dream Tetris piece was the field. (I just realized how vague "field" is. I mean a soccer field. Lengthwise it's a full field and widthwise it's two little fields side by side. Every international school I've been to has one. I've always considered it an international school staple. I would be worried about any school I came across that didn't have one. I don't believe such a thing exists.)
Surrounding the field was a running track. On the near side of the field between the track and the school building was a row of tiny trees. Next to the tiny trees were benches and tables where we ate lunch. The trees were so tiny they couldn't even provide any shade for us when we sat on the benches. They were like potted plants, barely trees at all in fact, when we left nearly 19 years ago.
The first thing we all noticed and exclaimed about when we entered was the row of huge trees between the school building and the track. The benches and tables are in the shade. There is a pebbled walkway between the trees and the tables. It looks great.
(Posting pictures on Flickr has been unreliable. Twitter has been better so I'll put a couple more up there. When Flickr cooperates again I will do a picture-heavy post as sort of a catch-up.)
The tables and benches looked familiar but there's no way to know for sure if they're actually the same tables and benches or if they are impostors. My memory yielded to what I saw, and now in my memory I see the tables and benches that I saw today. There must be a word for that.
We walked into the office and explained who we are and why we were wandering around. (I won't repeat the explanation that everyone we met was excited to hear that we had returned after so long and that they heartily welcomed us back, etc. Just assume everyone I mention did that, because they did.) The high school principal ended up showing us around and explaining some of the things that might have changed (nearly everything). A much larger student body, new classrooms, a new building opening next year that is going to completely change the physical dynamic of the campus, the technology and on and on.
We began talking about people who may still be around from 19 years ago. The list of people was very short, just two. One was a woman whose name Mom sort of recognized but couldn't match with a face, so we didn't see her. The other was my pre-school teacher, Ms. Bockarie.
The principal walked us over to the pre-school building and went into Ms. Bockarie's room while we stayed outside. She came out and looked at me. I could see a light deep inside her memory flicker just barely. She stared at me and said "Hold on, hold on, it's been a long time..." She looked at Mom and looked back at me and suddenly the flickering light became high beams. "THE ROBINSONS!"
She remembered my name and Mom's name and Jennifer's name. She gave us all hugs and we went inside to catch up on 19 years.
That was neat.
After we left Ms. Bockarie we walked around a bit more, noticing more and more changes and remembering things we thought we had forgotten. The playground is in the same place as it was. One time I busted my lip when I fell off those monkey bars and I cleaned myself up on a water fountain that was right over there. Hey, remember that once or twice we had yearbook photos taken on those metal pipe things? Yeah. Those are probably the same pipes, just with new paint. Remember we used to have assemblies in front of the library? Yeah. Way too many kids for that now.
When he was still showing us around, the principal asked me if I ever thought I would come back. I didn't know how to answer. I told him that when I left I was only seven and I don't think I had an opinion on that question at the time. Surely there are places I have been that I will never return to, some intentionally and some unintentionally. Likewise, there are places I have no specific plans to return to but will find myself in again. I never think when I leave a place that I will never return. My usual response to not being able to do something for whatever reason is "Well, next time." And I mean it at the time I say it. If I had a list of all the places I have verbally committed, just once, to returning to I would have quite a long list. I think I'm setting myself up for failure.
After lunch we drove around some more and saw where the new embassy is being built and the USAID office. We walked down to a couple beaches and took some beach pictures.
One of the first things Jennifer told us about when saw her last week was a statue called the Monument to the African Renaissance. It's insane, she said. It's a broad-chested, muscular African man, holding his baby up towards the sky, his wife gazing up at him, and the baby is pointing into the distance. It's huge. It's bigger than the Statue of Liberty. You can see it from the Corniche from miles away. It's completely ridiculous.
Jennifer must be drinking the tap water, I thought.
Lo and behold, the statue is as exactly as she described (see Twitter for pictures). You really can see it for miles. And it's not like you see a speck and know what it is because you know what it is. You can see the man and the baby and wife from miles away. I think you can see it from the Hubble but I can't prove it at this time. It's a monstrosity. Maybe you're familiar with the Australian aborigine's take on the genesis of humanity and that it involves a time when giants ruled the earth. Or maybe you're familiar with the Colossus of Rhodes. That's the scale we're talking about here.
We immediately agreed that we had to go into the little observation deck in the man's head.
It's 198 steps to just get to the base of the thing (the statue family is standing on a rock formation). Once inside, there are three levels of museum-like rooms, and an elevator to take you to the 15th floor, which is the guy's head. So we went up.
The view is amazing. It really is taller than the Statue of Liberty. While up there a guide explained why this thing exists. The President of Senegal has this vision for Senegal leading an African Renaissance. He told some famous architect about his vision and the architect turned the vision into a plan for a statue. Then, naturally, Senegal commissioned North Korea to build the statue.
What, you weren't expecting that?
North Korea has very few exports but apparently one of them is building Soviet-style monuments for other countries. No, this is not a joke. The guide told us that there are some North Koreans who live below the hill the statue is on. It's in their contract that they will remain until next year, being available to fix any statue problems in the meantime.
The guide also explained that the baby is pointing northwest because north is above south, relatively, at least on certain maps, so that indicates upward progress, and west is where you find western countries, countries with whom Africa wants to partner to help them spurn this renaissance. Sounded a bit contrived for me and Jennifer but hey, why the heck not.
You really need to see a picture of this thing. pic.twitter.com/8L0JCcJw
The way our route had taken us we were in position to try to find the house again on the way back to the hotel. Mom and Mor figured out where we were going amid all the construction and we found the roundabout with the turnoff to our street. We were on the roundabout, looked down the street to where the house was and...no house. It apparently had been torn down in lieu of new apartment buildings. So that was that.
We have no real plan for tomorrow. We might go walking around a part of town called Point E. If we do, there may be many good photo opportunities. Hopefully if there are I'll be able to share them. Darn you, third world wi-fi.
A couple days ago Mom asked the guy at the hotel desk if he could arrange a taxi to be at our service for a few hours so we could tour around and see some old stomping grounds. He said he just happens to have a friend who could do just that! Imagine the odds.
Mor is the cabbie's name, and he picked us up from the hotel at 10 this morning. His cab is impressive mostly in the sense that the doors don't require any tricks to open (the day we got here my door couldn't be opened from the inside and on a later trip the driver's door couldn't be opened from the outside so I had to open it for him -- I kid you not) and none of his tires were flat (apparently not a requirement).
First stop: our old house. To get there we took a road called the Corniche. It looks like a divided highway but it's really just a big city road, maybe closer to a boulevard. It runs NW-SE along the water on the west side of the city. When we lived here the Corniche would take you to a point where there was not much built up. There was not much built up around our house.
How things change. There is construction everywhere. New buildings everywhere, many more cars than there used to be, more people. Mom was trying to direct Mor to where the house was but got lost in all the new development because she couldn't recognize any of the old hidden among the new, if the old even still existed. Before we knew it we were up by the school.
New first stop: our old school. The International School of Dakar.
As I mentioned yesterday, I don't have all too many memories of Dakar, especially when compared with Abidjan. The school is something I have clear memories of. (We lived in Dakar when I was between ages 3 and 7, which is too young for school through the middle of second grade.) I remember my teachers and some of my friends and what stuff looked like and where stuff was.
The first challenge to my memory was what stuff looks like. The school has beefed up its security in the form of a more substantial gate. There's a whole village of high-rise apartments across the little dirt road from the front gate that wasn't there before. The road we used to take to get to the school was no longer accessible. That was just the exterior changes.
Walking through the gate and clearly seeing the school building and the field is not easy to describe, so bear with me. They didn't tear the place down and rebuild it. They didn't turn the building around or replace the field with an ice skating rink. The building is still where it's supposed to be and so is the field; the skeleton is in place. There was no mistaking where I was.
But my memory was under assault. I was battling three memory reconciliations: the way things naturally change over time; the way your perception of size changes over time as the subject of your memory stayed the same size but you have grown; and my own self-doubt concerning the reliability of the memory of a 7-year old.
Here's what I remember. The building was in an L shape. Fitting into the corner of the L like a dream Tetris piece was the field. (I just realized how vague "field" is. I mean a soccer field. Lengthwise it's a full field and widthwise it's two little fields side by side. Every international school I've been to has one. I've always considered it an international school staple. I would be worried about any school I came across that didn't have one. I don't believe such a thing exists.)
Surrounding the field was a running track. On the near side of the field between the track and the school building was a row of tiny trees. Next to the tiny trees were benches and tables where we ate lunch. The trees were so tiny they couldn't even provide any shade for us when we sat on the benches. They were like potted plants, barely trees at all in fact, when we left nearly 19 years ago.
The first thing we all noticed and exclaimed about when we entered was the row of huge trees between the school building and the track. The benches and tables are in the shade. There is a pebbled walkway between the trees and the tables. It looks great.
(Posting pictures on Flickr has been unreliable. Twitter has been better so I'll put a couple more up there. When Flickr cooperates again I will do a picture-heavy post as sort of a catch-up.)
The tables and benches looked familiar but there's no way to know for sure if they're actually the same tables and benches or if they are impostors. My memory yielded to what I saw, and now in my memory I see the tables and benches that I saw today. There must be a word for that.
We walked into the office and explained who we are and why we were wandering around. (I won't repeat the explanation that everyone we met was excited to hear that we had returned after so long and that they heartily welcomed us back, etc. Just assume everyone I mention did that, because they did.) The high school principal ended up showing us around and explaining some of the things that might have changed (nearly everything). A much larger student body, new classrooms, a new building opening next year that is going to completely change the physical dynamic of the campus, the technology and on and on.
We began talking about people who may still be around from 19 years ago. The list of people was very short, just two. One was a woman whose name Mom sort of recognized but couldn't match with a face, so we didn't see her. The other was my pre-school teacher, Ms. Bockarie.
The principal walked us over to the pre-school building and went into Ms. Bockarie's room while we stayed outside. She came out and looked at me. I could see a light deep inside her memory flicker just barely. She stared at me and said "Hold on, hold on, it's been a long time..." She looked at Mom and looked back at me and suddenly the flickering light became high beams. "THE ROBINSONS!"
She remembered my name and Mom's name and Jennifer's name. She gave us all hugs and we went inside to catch up on 19 years.
That was neat.
After we left Ms. Bockarie we walked around a bit more, noticing more and more changes and remembering things we thought we had forgotten. The playground is in the same place as it was. One time I busted my lip when I fell off those monkey bars and I cleaned myself up on a water fountain that was right over there. Hey, remember that once or twice we had yearbook photos taken on those metal pipe things? Yeah. Those are probably the same pipes, just with new paint. Remember we used to have assemblies in front of the library? Yeah. Way too many kids for that now.
When he was still showing us around, the principal asked me if I ever thought I would come back. I didn't know how to answer. I told him that when I left I was only seven and I don't think I had an opinion on that question at the time. Surely there are places I have been that I will never return to, some intentionally and some unintentionally. Likewise, there are places I have no specific plans to return to but will find myself in again. I never think when I leave a place that I will never return. My usual response to not being able to do something for whatever reason is "Well, next time." And I mean it at the time I say it. If I had a list of all the places I have verbally committed, just once, to returning to I would have quite a long list. I think I'm setting myself up for failure.
After lunch we drove around some more and saw where the new embassy is being built and the USAID office. We walked down to a couple beaches and took some beach pictures.
One of the first things Jennifer told us about when saw her last week was a statue called the Monument to the African Renaissance. It's insane, she said. It's a broad-chested, muscular African man, holding his baby up towards the sky, his wife gazing up at him, and the baby is pointing into the distance. It's huge. It's bigger than the Statue of Liberty. You can see it from the Corniche from miles away. It's completely ridiculous.
Jennifer must be drinking the tap water, I thought.
Lo and behold, the statue is as exactly as she described (see Twitter for pictures). You really can see it for miles. And it's not like you see a speck and know what it is because you know what it is. You can see the man and the baby and wife from miles away. I think you can see it from the Hubble but I can't prove it at this time. It's a monstrosity. Maybe you're familiar with the Australian aborigine's take on the genesis of humanity and that it involves a time when giants ruled the earth. Or maybe you're familiar with the Colossus of Rhodes. That's the scale we're talking about here.
We immediately agreed that we had to go into the little observation deck in the man's head.
It's 198 steps to just get to the base of the thing (the statue family is standing on a rock formation). Once inside, there are three levels of museum-like rooms, and an elevator to take you to the 15th floor, which is the guy's head. So we went up.
The view is amazing. It really is taller than the Statue of Liberty. While up there a guide explained why this thing exists. The President of Senegal has this vision for Senegal leading an African Renaissance. He told some famous architect about his vision and the architect turned the vision into a plan for a statue. Then, naturally, Senegal commissioned North Korea to build the statue.
What, you weren't expecting that?
North Korea has very few exports but apparently one of them is building Soviet-style monuments for other countries. No, this is not a joke. The guide told us that there are some North Koreans who live below the hill the statue is on. It's in their contract that they will remain until next year, being available to fix any statue problems in the meantime.
The guide also explained that the baby is pointing northwest because north is above south, relatively, at least on certain maps, so that indicates upward progress, and west is where you find western countries, countries with whom Africa wants to partner to help them spurn this renaissance. Sounded a bit contrived for me and Jennifer but hey, why the heck not.
You really need to see a picture of this thing. pic.twitter.com/8L0JCcJw
The way our route had taken us we were in position to try to find the house again on the way back to the hotel. Mom and Mor figured out where we were going amid all the construction and we found the roundabout with the turnoff to our street. We were on the roundabout, looked down the street to where the house was and...no house. It apparently had been torn down in lieu of new apartment buildings. So that was that.
We have no real plan for tomorrow. We might go walking around a part of town called Point E. If we do, there may be many good photo opportunities. Hopefully if there are I'll be able to share them. Darn you, third world wi-fi.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Day four
Everybody's selling something. Even history.
Today we went to Gorée Island. It's a touristy destination because it is an island a mere half hour boat ride from Dakar and it has nice views and seaside restaurants and theoretically some historic import. The theoretical historic import does not come solely from the fact that I went there as a child though as it turns out the actual historic import is only slightly more significant.
My childhood memories of Gorée are that it is an island and there is a building on it where slaves were held shortly before they were shipped to the West. I remember that in this building you could go into the wretched little rooms the slaves lived in. I remember the guide explaining how many slaves lived there at once and how many passed through this building, these rooms. I have a very clear recollection of thinking even then, "Wow, that's a lot of people in a small space."
My absolute clearest memory is of a door. It's next to one of the rooms that leads to outside the building, to the beach. The story is that this door represented the true end for any slave who passed through it, for passing through it meant the slave was heading for the slave ship, heading for certain death or hell.
This image was burned into my brain. It's a simple one, really. Imagine a rectangular hole in a dark wall. Sunlight sears through the hole. Once your eyes adjust to the brightness you can see the ocean and the horizon. That's it. If you are close to the door and look through it and down you can see the rocks that make the beach. That's really it. The door is right on the water. Nowhere else to go.
That image and that idea revisited me occasionally over the years like a timely ghost. When we learned about the slave trade in school I thought about that door and its role. When I took comparative religion I thought about the door and the prayers that were said when people crossed its threshold and whether they cared which god heard them. When I took a class on voodoo and hutu I thought about the door and wondered what prayers and desperate hopes of the ones who passed through the door remained in the beliefs of their Caribbean descendants and which were abandoned because they hadn't saved anyone. When I hear about people finding or losing religion I think about that door and whether it made its victims or enforcers find or lose religion. When someone describes their worst nightmare or sheer terror or feeling utterly hopeless to this day I think of the door.
We left Dakar for Abidjan when I was seven and a half. I don't have all too many memories of Dakar, most of my memories of Africa are in Abidjan. But that door was one of the few things from Senegal that I never forgot. So I was very interested in going back to visit it again.
This morning before breakfast I looked up Gorée on Wikipedia to see if there were any particulars in its history that would be good to know before we went. Now, you might think that a place that had had such an impression on me would have been a natural target for previous, random Wikipedia searches. Sounds reasonable to me, too. For some reason it never crossed my mind. I'd been there; what did I have to learn?
It turns out that the history of Gorée is in some dispute. The dispute is between the tour guides on the island (the basis for my memory) and just about everyone else, including renowned scholars and historians. The tour guides, whose wages no doubt rely upon admission tickets and tips, insist something like 6 million slaves passed through Gorée and that Gorée was the last stop for every group of slaves to the West from West Africa, thus Gorée's significance is hefty. The renowned scholars and historians say that maybe a few hundred slaves passed through Gorée each year and the family that essentially ran the island was more interested in trading inanimate goods than trading people.
Well.
The building's name is Maison des Esclaves ("House of the Slaves). When we arrived a tour was already in progress. We got there just in time to hear the guide pumping the importance of Gorée's history and, wait for it, yup -- there's that magical six million figure. He mentioned the cramped rooms and the door. Right, right, I remember this. My mind drifted to the renowned scholars.
As I waited for him to finish (which would release the gathered crowd to explore) I wondered how these new facts were going to change the experience for me. I looked around and noticed the whole place is much smaller than it is in my memory, and that it is not just an effect of me being much larger in proportion to the building than I was then; there are fewer rooms and much less overall square footage. This place can't hold thousands of people at once; at the very most a couple hundred. It's not the castle I remember, nor is it a fort nor a camp nor a plantation; it's a house with a courtyard and several large cells on the ground floor. It's a house, just like the name says.
Listening to the guide finishing his spiel I could feel myself becoming both skeptical and worried.
I was skeptical because I felt like the guide was trying to sell me a lie the same way the keychain guys and the masks guys and the tablecloth guys were trying to sell me their wares in the market. Was this yet another sales pitch?
I was worried because I felt I had some personal stake in this memory of mine. It has revisited me so many times, what would happen if it turned out to be based on something untrue? What if my (more) impressionable self of youth had a tainted memory? Would it change anything for me? What would it say about me if it did and what would it say about me if it didn't?
At the end of his speech the guide mentions that in the late 90s (I think - in fact, this was all in French so this is just my understanding) the Pope came to Gorée and, at the door, on the behalf of the rest of the world, asked the continent of Africa for its forgiveness. Since the guide's final punch was about the door, most of the crowd raced over in that direction when the speech was officially over. I headed upstairs to the little museum there, deciding to see the door last.
I don't remember the museum part of it at all. In fact, aside from being smaller, the whole place didn't really look the same. It's been renovated and painted since the last time we were there. It looked good, I guess, if you can say that about a place called House of the Slaves.
I walked around up there for a few minutes then went back down to the cells. I walked in and out of them, seeing if they matched my memory. For the most part they did except that (as I mentioned) I remember there being more of them. Different cells for men, women, children, young girls, and "recalcitrants
-- I remembered all that. Dark, all-concrete rooms with tiny slits in the wall for light, if any. Check, check, check.
I kept walking by the hallway with the door to see how the crowd was doing. The first thing I noticed was that the door is actually bigger than I remember, countering that standard that everything looks smaller when you return, larger. Part of my memory was that the door was so small, particularly so low, that the people going through the door in my imagination had to stoop over to get through it, that they weren't even offered the dignity of walking to their fate while standing straight up. This was a key part of the image for me and I could see immediately that it wasn't true. My skepticism and worry were not going anywhere.
I walked in circles until the crowd finally left. I took a picture from afar while I had the chance and walked over.
It turns out that the door changing size between my memory and reality really didn't matter. The Wikipedia article and its renowned scholars didn't matter, the guides and their marketing didn't matter, whatever the real numbers are didn't matter. What mattered was that all the emotions and questions and fears I have ever associated with the door were real. Are real. They were there. Standing there you can't help but feel it. When you look out that door, you are likely taking in the view of a person already in the throes of unimaginable horror, at the moment they felt slipping away what was the absolute last shred of hope they had. Not a picture of the view or a drawing or a written description like this one, but the actual thing. You are standing in their footsteps.
That's just one person's take, anyway. Individual results may vary.
The boat that brought us from the port held upwards of two hundred people or so. One of the groups on the boat appeared to be from a school, as all the boys were dressed alike and all the girls were dressed alike and they all stuck together. They were dressed in traditional West African garb but I'm not sure whether or not they were Senegalese; they were definitely African. They were in their mid to late teens, perhaps a few were even older than that. They were touring the Maison des Esclaves at the same time we were there.
While I was walking around the cells and waiting for the crowd to clear from the door, I wandered by this group several times. They were passing the time by posing inside the cells for pictures. Fun pictures, like the kind you would take at Disney World; the peace sign, big smiles, laughing, carrying on.
To be completely candid, I've been staring at the screen for ten minutes figuring out what to write about this. I haven't come up with a hypothesis or even a comment. My point isn't to rag on teenagers or compare cultures or wonder where their chaperones or parents were or anything like that. I'm still trying to process what I think of it. I just mention it because I think it was notable. Interpretations welcome.
That was actually the second trip to the Maison that we made today. The first time we happened to arrive right as the Maison was closing for its midday break, to reopen at 2:30. So we saw other parts of the island and went to lunch instead.
There are a bunch of restaurants right on the beach in front of the dock where the boat from Dakar parks. When we first arrived this morning the proprietor of one of them walked out and invited us in. Mom told her that we weren't looking for food just yet but we could use some drinks. Somehow that quickly turned into Mom and the restauranteur discovering that they both knew a couple of Americans who had lived on Gorée years and years ago. Yet another best friend!
We sat down and had some soda and juice. Our drinks came with coasters; not to save the tablecloth from sweaty glasses but to put on top of the glasses to protect the contents from the flies. Big, juicy flies. Flies so big I half-expected one to turn to me and say "Hey buddy, go ahead and leave the cap off that bottle, eh?" Luckily we were distracted from the flies by a very affectionate cat who attacked each of us in turn. See more on Flickr.
Despite the flies we returned to the same place for lunch. We all got fish dishes because, well, we were on an island and it seemed right. Mom got tieb ou dienne (just one of a multitude of spellings), the Senegalese national dish and a Robinson family favorite. Jennifer had fish brochettes, and I had yassa poisson (fish). Mine ended up being an entire grilled fish sitting on top of a glorious mound of rice. The fish was perfectly cooked. Photos on Twitter.
Other attractions on Gorée are the views of the ocean and Dakar, some remnants of a military installation, an oddly-shaped monument to something or other, and a couple museums no one goes to (such as, and I am not kidding, the Museum of the Sea). So we walked around a bunch until it was time to catch our boat back to the city. Photos will be on Flickr.
We've hired a taxi to take us around the city tomorrow to our old haunts: our house, the school, stuff like that. It probably won't happen but my goal is to find a chameleon. Cross your fingers.
Today we went to Gorée Island. It's a touristy destination because it is an island a mere half hour boat ride from Dakar and it has nice views and seaside restaurants and theoretically some historic import. The theoretical historic import does not come solely from the fact that I went there as a child though as it turns out the actual historic import is only slightly more significant.
My childhood memories of Gorée are that it is an island and there is a building on it where slaves were held shortly before they were shipped to the West. I remember that in this building you could go into the wretched little rooms the slaves lived in. I remember the guide explaining how many slaves lived there at once and how many passed through this building, these rooms. I have a very clear recollection of thinking even then, "Wow, that's a lot of people in a small space."
My absolute clearest memory is of a door. It's next to one of the rooms that leads to outside the building, to the beach. The story is that this door represented the true end for any slave who passed through it, for passing through it meant the slave was heading for the slave ship, heading for certain death or hell.
This image was burned into my brain. It's a simple one, really. Imagine a rectangular hole in a dark wall. Sunlight sears through the hole. Once your eyes adjust to the brightness you can see the ocean and the horizon. That's it. If you are close to the door and look through it and down you can see the rocks that make the beach. That's really it. The door is right on the water. Nowhere else to go.
That image and that idea revisited me occasionally over the years like a timely ghost. When we learned about the slave trade in school I thought about that door and its role. When I took comparative religion I thought about the door and the prayers that were said when people crossed its threshold and whether they cared which god heard them. When I took a class on voodoo and hutu I thought about the door and wondered what prayers and desperate hopes of the ones who passed through the door remained in the beliefs of their Caribbean descendants and which were abandoned because they hadn't saved anyone. When I hear about people finding or losing religion I think about that door and whether it made its victims or enforcers find or lose religion. When someone describes their worst nightmare or sheer terror or feeling utterly hopeless to this day I think of the door.
We left Dakar for Abidjan when I was seven and a half. I don't have all too many memories of Dakar, most of my memories of Africa are in Abidjan. But that door was one of the few things from Senegal that I never forgot. So I was very interested in going back to visit it again.
This morning before breakfast I looked up Gorée on Wikipedia to see if there were any particulars in its history that would be good to know before we went. Now, you might think that a place that had had such an impression on me would have been a natural target for previous, random Wikipedia searches. Sounds reasonable to me, too. For some reason it never crossed my mind. I'd been there; what did I have to learn?
It turns out that the history of Gorée is in some dispute. The dispute is between the tour guides on the island (the basis for my memory) and just about everyone else, including renowned scholars and historians. The tour guides, whose wages no doubt rely upon admission tickets and tips, insist something like 6 million slaves passed through Gorée and that Gorée was the last stop for every group of slaves to the West from West Africa, thus Gorée's significance is hefty. The renowned scholars and historians say that maybe a few hundred slaves passed through Gorée each year and the family that essentially ran the island was more interested in trading inanimate goods than trading people.
Well.
The building's name is Maison des Esclaves ("House of the Slaves). When we arrived a tour was already in progress. We got there just in time to hear the guide pumping the importance of Gorée's history and, wait for it, yup -- there's that magical six million figure. He mentioned the cramped rooms and the door. Right, right, I remember this. My mind drifted to the renowned scholars.
As I waited for him to finish (which would release the gathered crowd to explore) I wondered how these new facts were going to change the experience for me. I looked around and noticed the whole place is much smaller than it is in my memory, and that it is not just an effect of me being much larger in proportion to the building than I was then; there are fewer rooms and much less overall square footage. This place can't hold thousands of people at once; at the very most a couple hundred. It's not the castle I remember, nor is it a fort nor a camp nor a plantation; it's a house with a courtyard and several large cells on the ground floor. It's a house, just like the name says.
Listening to the guide finishing his spiel I could feel myself becoming both skeptical and worried.
I was skeptical because I felt like the guide was trying to sell me a lie the same way the keychain guys and the masks guys and the tablecloth guys were trying to sell me their wares in the market. Was this yet another sales pitch?
I was worried because I felt I had some personal stake in this memory of mine. It has revisited me so many times, what would happen if it turned out to be based on something untrue? What if my (more) impressionable self of youth had a tainted memory? Would it change anything for me? What would it say about me if it did and what would it say about me if it didn't?
At the end of his speech the guide mentions that in the late 90s (I think - in fact, this was all in French so this is just my understanding) the Pope came to Gorée and, at the door, on the behalf of the rest of the world, asked the continent of Africa for its forgiveness. Since the guide's final punch was about the door, most of the crowd raced over in that direction when the speech was officially over. I headed upstairs to the little museum there, deciding to see the door last.
I don't remember the museum part of it at all. In fact, aside from being smaller, the whole place didn't really look the same. It's been renovated and painted since the last time we were there. It looked good, I guess, if you can say that about a place called House of the Slaves.
I walked around up there for a few minutes then went back down to the cells. I walked in and out of them, seeing if they matched my memory. For the most part they did except that (as I mentioned) I remember there being more of them. Different cells for men, women, children, young girls, and "recalcitrants
-- I remembered all that. Dark, all-concrete rooms with tiny slits in the wall for light, if any. Check, check, check.
I kept walking by the hallway with the door to see how the crowd was doing. The first thing I noticed was that the door is actually bigger than I remember, countering that standard that everything looks smaller when you return, larger. Part of my memory was that the door was so small, particularly so low, that the people going through the door in my imagination had to stoop over to get through it, that they weren't even offered the dignity of walking to their fate while standing straight up. This was a key part of the image for me and I could see immediately that it wasn't true. My skepticism and worry were not going anywhere.
I walked in circles until the crowd finally left. I took a picture from afar while I had the chance and walked over.
It turns out that the door changing size between my memory and reality really didn't matter. The Wikipedia article and its renowned scholars didn't matter, the guides and their marketing didn't matter, whatever the real numbers are didn't matter. What mattered was that all the emotions and questions and fears I have ever associated with the door were real. Are real. They were there. Standing there you can't help but feel it. When you look out that door, you are likely taking in the view of a person already in the throes of unimaginable horror, at the moment they felt slipping away what was the absolute last shred of hope they had. Not a picture of the view or a drawing or a written description like this one, but the actual thing. You are standing in their footsteps.
That's just one person's take, anyway. Individual results may vary.
The boat that brought us from the port held upwards of two hundred people or so. One of the groups on the boat appeared to be from a school, as all the boys were dressed alike and all the girls were dressed alike and they all stuck together. They were dressed in traditional West African garb but I'm not sure whether or not they were Senegalese; they were definitely African. They were in their mid to late teens, perhaps a few were even older than that. They were touring the Maison des Esclaves at the same time we were there.
While I was walking around the cells and waiting for the crowd to clear from the door, I wandered by this group several times. They were passing the time by posing inside the cells for pictures. Fun pictures, like the kind you would take at Disney World; the peace sign, big smiles, laughing, carrying on.
To be completely candid, I've been staring at the screen for ten minutes figuring out what to write about this. I haven't come up with a hypothesis or even a comment. My point isn't to rag on teenagers or compare cultures or wonder where their chaperones or parents were or anything like that. I'm still trying to process what I think of it. I just mention it because I think it was notable. Interpretations welcome.
That was actually the second trip to the Maison that we made today. The first time we happened to arrive right as the Maison was closing for its midday break, to reopen at 2:30. So we saw other parts of the island and went to lunch instead.
There are a bunch of restaurants right on the beach in front of the dock where the boat from Dakar parks. When we first arrived this morning the proprietor of one of them walked out and invited us in. Mom told her that we weren't looking for food just yet but we could use some drinks. Somehow that quickly turned into Mom and the restauranteur discovering that they both knew a couple of Americans who had lived on Gorée years and years ago. Yet another best friend!
We sat down and had some soda and juice. Our drinks came with coasters; not to save the tablecloth from sweaty glasses but to put on top of the glasses to protect the contents from the flies. Big, juicy flies. Flies so big I half-expected one to turn to me and say "Hey buddy, go ahead and leave the cap off that bottle, eh?" Luckily we were distracted from the flies by a very affectionate cat who attacked each of us in turn. See more on Flickr.
Despite the flies we returned to the same place for lunch. We all got fish dishes because, well, we were on an island and it seemed right. Mom got tieb ou dienne (just one of a multitude of spellings), the Senegalese national dish and a Robinson family favorite. Jennifer had fish brochettes, and I had yassa poisson (fish). Mine ended up being an entire grilled fish sitting on top of a glorious mound of rice. The fish was perfectly cooked. Photos on Twitter.
Other attractions on Gorée are the views of the ocean and Dakar, some remnants of a military installation, an oddly-shaped monument to something or other, and a couple museums no one goes to (such as, and I am not kidding, the Museum of the Sea). So we walked around a bunch until it was time to catch our boat back to the city. Photos will be on Flickr.
We've hired a taxi to take us around the city tomorrow to our old haunts: our house, the school, stuff like that. It probably won't happen but my goal is to find a chameleon. Cross your fingers.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Day three
Today was pretty low-key. The goal for the day was basically to relax in preparation for the walkathon that will occur tomorrow at Ile de Gorée, we most sat around and ate.
Breakfast at the hotel has been fairly standard. (I refuse to use the term "continental breakfast" in deference to my hatred for both the term itself and the quality of the food-like substances that occur in hotels of the caliber that unfortunately fits my normally humble budget when traveling. My usual plan of attack when faced with one of these abominable excuses for a meal is either a) go nearly anywhere else that's open, b) go to the nearest coffee disbursement center and drink so much that I'll forget I'm hungry until I'm in the next town with better food, or c) go hungry. I really mean it when I say I hate crappy continental breakfasts. This is coming from a guy who will eat nearly anything you put in front of him regardless of beast of origin or organ thereof. I truly despise continental breakfasts.) There is fresh fruit, crepes, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, yogurt, milk, coffee (Nescafé of course!), tea, and each person gets a little basket of baguette, pain au chocolat, croissant, et du jam and butter. Wonderful.
Aside from the basket of bread and spreadable goodness, the rest is on a buffet. It is generally bad news for fellow customers when there is a buffet but the waitstaff do a good job of keeping the buffet stocked.
So we had a good breakfast, got ready to go out for the day, and essentially went to find a café to sit in until lunch time. This is one of my favorite ways to relax, whether at home or on the road: wake up, eat, shower, go somewhere else to sit around, have a coffee, and watch the people go by until it's time to eat again.
But wait. This is Africa.
The electricity had been going off and on all morning. No matter, there are plenty of windows in the hotel and the sun was shining. The coffee was still hot, so no harm done, right?
Wrong. Unfortunately, whatever heat source is used for the coffee is not also used for the water source of the showers in the hotel. This type of scenario yields two possible courses of action: 1) completing the minimum required shower activities while coming into contact with as little of the icy water as possible, or 2) taking a deep breath and embracing the frigidness, spending the entire shower lost in your imagination, in a much warmer place. I chose option 2.
So a cold shower is not the way I normally prepare for a long morning of coffee drinking and people watching. No problem. The café brings hope. On to the café! Waitress, trois cafés, s'il vous plait!
Quoi?
Pas de café?
No electricity at the café either, so no coffee machine. C'est dommage. They did manage to make me a delicious mushroom and cheese omelette, though. Not sure how that works.
We were joined at lunch by a colleague of Jennifer. After lunch the four of us went back to the hotel to try again to get coffee (success!). Mom and I left them to walk to the US Embassy, former familial stomping grounds. We chatted with one of the guards and poked around a little. The neighborhood the embassies are in is so different than the neighborhood our hotel and the markets are in. It was nice and quiet with no real vendors to speak of. I almost got hit by a taxi but that's par for the course.
One vendor I did manage to find was a coconut dude (Robinson family term of art). Coconut dudes are guys with big wheelbarrows full of coconuts who wheel around town and camp out on the sidewalk. When you ask for a coconut they chop one of the ends off so you can drink the juice. When you're done, they chop the whole thing open so that you can scoop out the fruit inside. I did this frequently as a kid so I was excited to relive a small part of my youth. There's no coconut like a freshly chopped coconut, let me tell you.
Mom and I walked back to the hotel and found Jennifer and friend. Friend departed and the three of us decided it was time for aperitifs and to start thinking about dinner. We settled on a Korean place across the street. Yes, I know: Korean food in Dakar? When we got there we were the only non-Asians present, which we took as a good sign. The food was fine but not amazing.
And here I am writing at 2:35am. Sleep has not come easy, likely because of jet lag and the fact that I am not taking seriously the task of beating it. We are hiking all around Gorée tomorrow though so I will try to get rest. (If you're interested in understanding my forthcoming post on Gorée, read about it on Wikipedia.) I put some pictures from today on Twitter, and I've been putting stuff on Flickr in small bits and pieces. See the links on the right to get to those things. Tomorrow many photos will be taken, I am sure.
A demain.
Breakfast at the hotel has been fairly standard. (I refuse to use the term "continental breakfast" in deference to my hatred for both the term itself and the quality of the food-like substances that occur in hotels of the caliber that unfortunately fits my normally humble budget when traveling. My usual plan of attack when faced with one of these abominable excuses for a meal is either a) go nearly anywhere else that's open, b) go to the nearest coffee disbursement center and drink so much that I'll forget I'm hungry until I'm in the next town with better food, or c) go hungry. I really mean it when I say I hate crappy continental breakfasts. This is coming from a guy who will eat nearly anything you put in front of him regardless of beast of origin or organ thereof. I truly despise continental breakfasts.) There is fresh fruit, crepes, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, yogurt, milk, coffee (Nescafé of course!), tea, and each person gets a little basket of baguette, pain au chocolat, croissant, et du jam and butter. Wonderful.
Aside from the basket of bread and spreadable goodness, the rest is on a buffet. It is generally bad news for fellow customers when there is a buffet but the waitstaff do a good job of keeping the buffet stocked.
So we had a good breakfast, got ready to go out for the day, and essentially went to find a café to sit in until lunch time. This is one of my favorite ways to relax, whether at home or on the road: wake up, eat, shower, go somewhere else to sit around, have a coffee, and watch the people go by until it's time to eat again.
But wait. This is Africa.
The electricity had been going off and on all morning. No matter, there are plenty of windows in the hotel and the sun was shining. The coffee was still hot, so no harm done, right?
Wrong. Unfortunately, whatever heat source is used for the coffee is not also used for the water source of the showers in the hotel. This type of scenario yields two possible courses of action: 1) completing the minimum required shower activities while coming into contact with as little of the icy water as possible, or 2) taking a deep breath and embracing the frigidness, spending the entire shower lost in your imagination, in a much warmer place. I chose option 2.
So a cold shower is not the way I normally prepare for a long morning of coffee drinking and people watching. No problem. The café brings hope. On to the café! Waitress, trois cafés, s'il vous plait!
Quoi?
Pas de café?
No electricity at the café either, so no coffee machine. C'est dommage. They did manage to make me a delicious mushroom and cheese omelette, though. Not sure how that works.
We were joined at lunch by a colleague of Jennifer. After lunch the four of us went back to the hotel to try again to get coffee (success!). Mom and I left them to walk to the US Embassy, former familial stomping grounds. We chatted with one of the guards and poked around a little. The neighborhood the embassies are in is so different than the neighborhood our hotel and the markets are in. It was nice and quiet with no real vendors to speak of. I almost got hit by a taxi but that's par for the course.
One vendor I did manage to find was a coconut dude (Robinson family term of art). Coconut dudes are guys with big wheelbarrows full of coconuts who wheel around town and camp out on the sidewalk. When you ask for a coconut they chop one of the ends off so you can drink the juice. When you're done, they chop the whole thing open so that you can scoop out the fruit inside. I did this frequently as a kid so I was excited to relive a small part of my youth. There's no coconut like a freshly chopped coconut, let me tell you.
Mom and I walked back to the hotel and found Jennifer and friend. Friend departed and the three of us decided it was time for aperitifs and to start thinking about dinner. We settled on a Korean place across the street. Yes, I know: Korean food in Dakar? When we got there we were the only non-Asians present, which we took as a good sign. The food was fine but not amazing.
And here I am writing at 2:35am. Sleep has not come easy, likely because of jet lag and the fact that I am not taking seriously the task of beating it. We are hiking all around Gorée tomorrow though so I will try to get rest. (If you're interested in understanding my forthcoming post on Gorée, read about it on Wikipedia.) I put some pictures from today on Twitter, and I've been putting stuff on Flickr in small bits and pieces. See the links on the right to get to those things. Tomorrow many photos will be taken, I am sure.
A demain.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Day two
Warning: very long.
Note: having trouble uploading photos at the moment. Will update with photos later and notify on Twitter.
Today's brilliant business idea: open a consulting firm and staff it completely with Senegalese.
Senegalese are the best networkers I have ever seen. They are super friendly and they can and will talk about anything in order to get you into their shop. The reason they are more impressive than even your slimiest DC networker is that every slimy DC networker has something in common with you that they can relate with you about. You like football? I like football! You live in DC? I live in DC! How about that thing that person said recently in the news? Crazy!
Senegalese don't have that handicap. They can only relate to you because you're a person and they're a person and you're both in the same spot at the same time. (That's not much to work with. Even with the slimiest DC networker, that would result in at least one awkward silence. The Senegalese seller doesn't believe in awkward moments.) Occasionally you might be in that spot because you're shopping, in which case there's a chance you'd actually be interested in what their selling, but oftentimes not. But they will still try to get you into their shop, "not to buy but just to look."
Hey, hey, my friend, where are you from? Canada? US? Welcome, bienvenue. Do you like things? Come look at my shop. No, no, of course not to buy, just to look. Your first time in Senegal? I have many things, tres jolies. Ah, gardes les voitures, be careful mon ami. Do you like Dakar? It's vraiment chaud, non? C'est ta soeur? Does she like things? Look at that guy selling watches. He's my cousin. Do you like watches? I can get you a good price, moin chere. I've never been to les Etats-Unis, tu les aimes? You have a watch? Get another one as a cadeau. Get deux watches. Best price for you my friend. When is your birthday? When's your cousin's birthday? How about a tablecloth? My sister sells those. I have a sister like you! Is that your maman? Does she need new shoes? Aimes-tu les oranges? Where did you eat lunch? My friend has a café...
And the entire time he will have a huge smile on his face. And why wouldn't he? It's a game and he's playing with you. You can't help but smile back and answer his inane questions.
I'm from the US. No, I don't like things. I'm not achete anything today. No, I've deja been to Senegal. Yes I am sure your things are jolies. Ah, merci mon ami. Yes j'aime Dakar. It's not too hot mais oui c'est ma soeur. I like les Etats-Unis, it's where I bought my watch, see? No one I know needs a watch. Mon anniversaire? I don't buy cadeaux for mes cousins. I don't have a table but that is my maman, oui. She already has shoes. J'aime les oranges bien sur but I already ate lunch...
That's a good trick that sometimes works even though they know you're probably lying, telling them you already have what they're selling. I already have a keychain. Yes, even one shaped like an elephant. And another shaped like a tree. Yes, what are the odds? I already have a set of seven masks representing the days of the week. I already have a cell phone charger. I already have batteries, a comb, a peeled orange, a child's plaything. I already have sandals, an ashtray, a hat, and toilet paper...
They don't care who they're selling what product to. My trick of telling them I already own whatever they're selling can get a little dicey. Yes, I already have a bottle opener, yes I have a drum, yes I have a pretty necklace...er...yes, I have a hair bow of the Senegalese flag...yes, I, uh, I already have a nice pair of women's pants...no, okay, I don't have that...no, I don't have any female relatives or friends who would want that...okay, yes I do...I'll take seven. Argh.
Anyway, we each have about four new best friends. It's hard not to when they're so friendly and chatty. And helpful. When Mom and I were walking around yesterday I left her alone for about ten seconds so I could cross the street to look at a street sign. When I got back she was in the middle of a conversation with a guy who had simply appeared from the ether like a genie from a lamp. His name was Diallo (pronounced "Jallo") and he had a shop. Not today, not today. Maybe tomorrow? Sure.
Well I'll be darned if, since our first meeting, Diallo hasn't stopped us four or five separate times in the street. Okay, so it's not like we blend in to the crowd real well, I realize this. It's still impressive given how busy that particular street is. We ended today being herded by Diallo into the depths of Sandaga market...but let me back up.
After a lunch of tasty but undersized chawarmas we headed towards Marché Kermel. While sidestepping a moving car by about 3 inches, a hand clapped me on the shoulder.
"Mon ami!" said the smiling African in the strikingly colorful outfit.
"Errr, bonjour!" said the confused white guy.
"You remember me from the hotel!"
"I do?"
"Oui, you walked by my store ce matin and I said bonjour!"
Mon frère, do you have any idea how many of you shopkeepers say bonjour to me on an hourly basis? Scratch that, on a minute-by-minute basis?
"Ah, bien sur! L'hotel, I remember now!" I lied.
So we started chatting in the middle of traffic. He asked where we were going, and I told him. He nodded approvingly. Ah, le marché, le shopping. Tres bien.
Mom joined us and suggested we get out of the middle of traffic. Moms! Sheesh. He said bonjour to her and she asked him which market is the best. He said definitely the other one, Sandaga. It's bigger and has more stuff, more jolies choses. It has everything in fact. Oh and do you know what else it has? Friends! Friends with good prices! Hooray! Allons-y!
So we turned around and headed towards Sandaga instead.
It might sound silly to you reading this, but I'm telling you these guys are friendly. Some of them, like our newest best friend Zal, are electric. I've had people who I would otherwise consider intelligent and self-aware and just the right amount of cynical and skeptical of charming folks describe to me how they have essentially melted into puddles when meeting especially effective politicians. Bill Clinton is one of them. I have heard from multiple independent sources that when you meet the man and shake his hand you feel like you could be his new best friend. I am telling you: some of these guys could compete with Clinton if they had the chance.
First stop at Sandaga was a store with art and whatnot. By store I mean two small rooms carved into a wall, behind a garage door. This was clearly the Toubab Store. (For the uninitiated: a toubab, pronounced "two-bob", is a foreigner, probably white, probably shopping, probably vulnerable to the charms of West African salesmen. In other words: us.) They had to turn the lights on for us. Hey! Hey the toubabs are here! We'll be able to afford the electric bill for the next six months after this, turn the lights on! And come watch!
The ladies (Mom, Jennifer, and Jennifer's colleague Anne) were not terribly interested in the art and whatnot. Pas de probleme, pas de probleme. Venez ici...look! Cloth! And bags made of cloth! And other things! Jolies, jolies! Pretty!
Well that got 'em. All it took was two casts and the catch of the day was on the line. Immediately a dozen guys showed up out of nowhere, possibly thin air, and fabric began flying everywhere. I busied myself by taking pictures and insisting that I was the photographer and not interested in buying anything. No, not even looking, non merci. Yes, we are amis, oui.
After I had shooed off two or three guys I looked over at the girls. Anne was holding at least four or five bags, Jennifer was peering at a couple yards of cloth being paraded in front of her, and Mom had transformed into a Mom-sized mound of walking, talking fabric. It was clear we were going to be a while, so I walked over to the door to find a comfortable spot to lean.
Naturally, a friend-to-be appeared by my side in a puff of spontaneous genesis.
"Hello, my friend."
"Bonjour. I'm not buying anything."
"Vraiment?" Really? You sure?
"Yes, vraiment." I am sure.
"C'est bon. I don't even work here."
So I had to laugh. Well what are you doing in here, then? Oh, I work just outside. Where? Under the tree across the street. Oh, yes, the tree, I saw it before, when I was outside. That's my tree, I sell masks, some of them are old, they're antiques, they're plus chère que the new ones because they're older and stronger. Ah, tres bien, plus fort, tres bien. Oui.
And I thought that was it. An attempted sale, a rejection, still friends. Would have been the hundredth time today. But no, he wasn't done.
In fact, he hadn't even started.
I can't tell you how this next part began because it happened so quickly that I don't remember. After the briefest of pauses he was suddenly off to the races, philosophizing and telling me his life story all at once. Later in the day we toubabs sat a café to catch our breath and I scribbled down everything I could remember. Here's what he told me, intentionally left in one block paragraph to give you an idea of exactly how it was told to me minus the occasional question I managed to slip in. Imagine it in about 60% French and 40% English, going back and forth from one to the other often in the middle of sentences, a storm of fabric flying around us:
My name is Mwaz. I'm not a rich man but I am happy. How could I not be? I have work and I have my health. Good health. I work hard during the day and I sleep well at night. That's how a man sleeps well at night, you know, it's hard work. Hard work and good sleep, that's what makes you happy. And you need to work hard five or six days a week so you have time to spend with your family and in your garden when you're not working. Those are what makes you happy. Without time for those things a man can't be happy. It doesn't matter how much money you make. You can make a lot of money and be rich but never have time for your family or your heart or your head and you will never be happy. You need to relax. And if you have the time you also need to travel. I know you are a traveler because you are in Dakar so I know I can tell you this and you will understand. A man who doesn't travel wouldn't understand. Travel helps you spread ideas and helps you learn ideas from the places you go. Ideas. Ideas are important. Ideas help you understand yourself and other people, even if you never see them again. A man who doesn't travel and is born and raised in one place and never leaves might think he has a fulfilling life but he will only think that because he doesn't know any better. He won't have any ideas. I was once visited by a man, an Australian man. He spoke only a little French and I didn't speak English. He taught me English. He taught me English because he was in Senegal and had no money and couldn't go anywhere and I helped him. He stayed in my house until he found a job. This was a long time ago, a long long time ago. He came from a family of musicians, he was traveling playing music when he was left alone with no money. He taught me English and I helped him with his French and he got a job playing piano in a jazz band at a hotel downtown. Just down the street there. He played jazz piano on the weekends and regular piano during the week. There was an American band that was playing hotels in West Africa and they came to Dakar to play in the Australian's hotel. The band had a pianist who didn't like Africa and wanted to get out of his contract and go home to America. The Australian took his spot in the band and left Dakar with them and never came back. The Australian wrote me three or four letters but then never again. That was it. I helped him like that and three or four letters and then I never heard from him again. That's fine. I am happy I could help him. My grandfather told me I did the right thing. Even though my grandfather was not happy at first that I brought this man home to help him, in the end he told me I did the right thing. My grandfather was a great man. He was in the army. He used to write me letters when he was traveling in the army. His letters gave me advice on life. He is the one who told me to travel. In his letters he told me about all the places he went and how the army made him realize what is important in life. I still have all his letters. If I had children I wouldn't even tell them anything about anything, I would just give them his letters and tell them to read them. That's what I did myself. I didn't listen to my parents, only to the letters. My parents weren't good people. Children shouldn't always listen to their parents. They should only listen to their parents if their parents if their parents are good, wise people, like my grandfather. If a father strikes his son, the son will then strike his son. My parents tried to teach me bad ways but I didn't listen, I listened to my grandfather and his letters. I still have the letters, I still read them. I took them with me when I was in the army. When I was in the army I was in a war. War is terrible. I saw entire villages bombed by planes in the air. They just exploded in fire and everybody died, just like that. If there were no planes, people were killed by other people. Women and children raped and murdered, men had their legs chopped or shot off so all that was left of them was their chest and up, before they were dead. There's no sense in that. It's not human. The men who did that had no sense. War...it's terrible. And it's caused by people not listening to each other. That's it. That's it. That's all.
The fabric-shoppers were done and heading out the door. I told Mwaz I had to go with them but thanked him for sharing his story with me and that I appreciated his advice. He fuzzily snapped out of his storytelling and asked if I would come to his tree to look at his masks. I said of course. Bien sur. Mom, we have to go look at this guy's masks. I'll tell you why later.
We looked but didn't buy. I told him we'll come back on Wednesday. I really am planning on it. Right here, by the tree? Got it. See you then.
After one more stop and the café break where I jotted my notes, we had to go see Diallo, the man who materialized next to Mom earlier. Mom had said she would go see him and weary as she was, she wanted to keep her word. Bon. Allons-y.
We left the café and Diallo dropped out of the sky to guide us to his shop. Earlier he had said if we wanted to find him we just had to walk down that way, turn left at le pharmacie, turn à gauche encore une fois, and voilà, you will find Diallo.
Not so. In what turned into a fifteen minute walk through a labyrinth of stalls and cars and people on narrow strips of dirt and pavement that weren't quite roads or even sidewalks, we were lead to a large, dark shop. The shop was a large hole in the side of a concrete building. It was at least 40 feet deep into the building but I can't even estimate the exact distance because there were no lights. There were men sewing away on pedal-churned sewing machines amongst piles and piles of fabric and clothes and bags and hats and tablecloths. Some were sitting by the outside, close enough to guide their machines by the sunlight. Others were so deep in the shop that they were in darkness, but they were working away, tapping the pedals, sewing, sewing.
Diallo and his co-salesman were trying to get the female toubabs to venture into the dark depths of the shop but Mama Toubab made it clear that she was not shopping in darkness. There was some negotiating in a slightly better-lit hallway and an agreement was made to come back later, maybe another day, we were all tired. Sure, sure.
Diallo navigated us out of the maze. His buddy followed for a little while, bargaining all the while. He finally decided that he had reached an impasse with Mom and gave up. Diallo was not done, however. His final offer was that he could get Mom the price she was asking if she gave up half in cash today and paid the rest on delivery. Diallo would even bring it to the hotel personally! Tomorrow! We had a quick telepathic Toubab Huddle in the form of shifty glancing and decided that ten bucks was worth the risk, and was at the very least the price of admission for the entertainment if nothing else, if he doesn't come back.
Diallo also offered to take me out tomorrow. Do you like Senegalese music? Sure. Tomorrow I will take you out, you can dance to the Senegalese music, dance with gazelles. Gazelles, did you say gazelles? Yes, gazelles! That sounds mighty fine but I think tomorrow ne marche pas for me. Okay, maybe next time. Yes, peut-etre. See you tomorrow, I will bring the bags! Oui, bien. A demain! A demain, Diallo, a demain.
So that will be tomorrow.
Note: having trouble uploading photos at the moment. Will update with photos later and notify on Twitter.
Today's brilliant business idea: open a consulting firm and staff it completely with Senegalese.
Senegalese are the best networkers I have ever seen. They are super friendly and they can and will talk about anything in order to get you into their shop. The reason they are more impressive than even your slimiest DC networker is that every slimy DC networker has something in common with you that they can relate with you about. You like football? I like football! You live in DC? I live in DC! How about that thing that person said recently in the news? Crazy!
Senegalese don't have that handicap. They can only relate to you because you're a person and they're a person and you're both in the same spot at the same time. (That's not much to work with. Even with the slimiest DC networker, that would result in at least one awkward silence. The Senegalese seller doesn't believe in awkward moments.) Occasionally you might be in that spot because you're shopping, in which case there's a chance you'd actually be interested in what their selling, but oftentimes not. But they will still try to get you into their shop, "not to buy but just to look."
Hey, hey, my friend, where are you from? Canada? US? Welcome, bienvenue. Do you like things? Come look at my shop. No, no, of course not to buy, just to look. Your first time in Senegal? I have many things, tres jolies. Ah, gardes les voitures, be careful mon ami. Do you like Dakar? It's vraiment chaud, non? C'est ta soeur? Does she like things? Look at that guy selling watches. He's my cousin. Do you like watches? I can get you a good price, moin chere. I've never been to les Etats-Unis, tu les aimes? You have a watch? Get another one as a cadeau. Get deux watches. Best price for you my friend. When is your birthday? When's your cousin's birthday? How about a tablecloth? My sister sells those. I have a sister like you! Is that your maman? Does she need new shoes? Aimes-tu les oranges? Where did you eat lunch? My friend has a café...
And the entire time he will have a huge smile on his face. And why wouldn't he? It's a game and he's playing with you. You can't help but smile back and answer his inane questions.
I'm from the US. No, I don't like things. I'm not achete anything today. No, I've deja been to Senegal. Yes I am sure your things are jolies. Ah, merci mon ami. Yes j'aime Dakar. It's not too hot mais oui c'est ma soeur. I like les Etats-Unis, it's where I bought my watch, see? No one I know needs a watch. Mon anniversaire? I don't buy cadeaux for mes cousins. I don't have a table but that is my maman, oui. She already has shoes. J'aime les oranges bien sur but I already ate lunch...
That's a good trick that sometimes works even though they know you're probably lying, telling them you already have what they're selling. I already have a keychain. Yes, even one shaped like an elephant. And another shaped like a tree. Yes, what are the odds? I already have a set of seven masks representing the days of the week. I already have a cell phone charger. I already have batteries, a comb, a peeled orange, a child's plaything. I already have sandals, an ashtray, a hat, and toilet paper...
They don't care who they're selling what product to. My trick of telling them I already own whatever they're selling can get a little dicey. Yes, I already have a bottle opener, yes I have a drum, yes I have a pretty necklace...er...yes, I have a hair bow of the Senegalese flag...yes, I, uh, I already have a nice pair of women's pants...no, okay, I don't have that...no, I don't have any female relatives or friends who would want that...okay, yes I do...I'll take seven. Argh.
Anyway, we each have about four new best friends. It's hard not to when they're so friendly and chatty. And helpful. When Mom and I were walking around yesterday I left her alone for about ten seconds so I could cross the street to look at a street sign. When I got back she was in the middle of a conversation with a guy who had simply appeared from the ether like a genie from a lamp. His name was Diallo (pronounced "Jallo") and he had a shop. Not today, not today. Maybe tomorrow? Sure.
Well I'll be darned if, since our first meeting, Diallo hasn't stopped us four or five separate times in the street. Okay, so it's not like we blend in to the crowd real well, I realize this. It's still impressive given how busy that particular street is. We ended today being herded by Diallo into the depths of Sandaga market...but let me back up.
After a lunch of tasty but undersized chawarmas we headed towards Marché Kermel. While sidestepping a moving car by about 3 inches, a hand clapped me on the shoulder.
"Mon ami!" said the smiling African in the strikingly colorful outfit.
"Errr, bonjour!" said the confused white guy.
"You remember me from the hotel!"
"I do?"
"Oui, you walked by my store ce matin and I said bonjour!"
Mon frère, do you have any idea how many of you shopkeepers say bonjour to me on an hourly basis? Scratch that, on a minute-by-minute basis?
"Ah, bien sur! L'hotel, I remember now!" I lied.
So we started chatting in the middle of traffic. He asked where we were going, and I told him. He nodded approvingly. Ah, le marché, le shopping. Tres bien.
Mom joined us and suggested we get out of the middle of traffic. Moms! Sheesh. He said bonjour to her and she asked him which market is the best. He said definitely the other one, Sandaga. It's bigger and has more stuff, more jolies choses. It has everything in fact. Oh and do you know what else it has? Friends! Friends with good prices! Hooray! Allons-y!
So we turned around and headed towards Sandaga instead.
It might sound silly to you reading this, but I'm telling you these guys are friendly. Some of them, like our newest best friend Zal, are electric. I've had people who I would otherwise consider intelligent and self-aware and just the right amount of cynical and skeptical of charming folks describe to me how they have essentially melted into puddles when meeting especially effective politicians. Bill Clinton is one of them. I have heard from multiple independent sources that when you meet the man and shake his hand you feel like you could be his new best friend. I am telling you: some of these guys could compete with Clinton if they had the chance.
First stop at Sandaga was a store with art and whatnot. By store I mean two small rooms carved into a wall, behind a garage door. This was clearly the Toubab Store. (For the uninitiated: a toubab, pronounced "two-bob", is a foreigner, probably white, probably shopping, probably vulnerable to the charms of West African salesmen. In other words: us.) They had to turn the lights on for us. Hey! Hey the toubabs are here! We'll be able to afford the electric bill for the next six months after this, turn the lights on! And come watch!
The ladies (Mom, Jennifer, and Jennifer's colleague Anne) were not terribly interested in the art and whatnot. Pas de probleme, pas de probleme. Venez ici...look! Cloth! And bags made of cloth! And other things! Jolies, jolies! Pretty!
Well that got 'em. All it took was two casts and the catch of the day was on the line. Immediately a dozen guys showed up out of nowhere, possibly thin air, and fabric began flying everywhere. I busied myself by taking pictures and insisting that I was the photographer and not interested in buying anything. No, not even looking, non merci. Yes, we are amis, oui.
After I had shooed off two or three guys I looked over at the girls. Anne was holding at least four or five bags, Jennifer was peering at a couple yards of cloth being paraded in front of her, and Mom had transformed into a Mom-sized mound of walking, talking fabric. It was clear we were going to be a while, so I walked over to the door to find a comfortable spot to lean.
Naturally, a friend-to-be appeared by my side in a puff of spontaneous genesis.
"Hello, my friend."
"Bonjour. I'm not buying anything."
"Vraiment?" Really? You sure?
"Yes, vraiment." I am sure.
"C'est bon. I don't even work here."
So I had to laugh. Well what are you doing in here, then? Oh, I work just outside. Where? Under the tree across the street. Oh, yes, the tree, I saw it before, when I was outside. That's my tree, I sell masks, some of them are old, they're antiques, they're plus chère que the new ones because they're older and stronger. Ah, tres bien, plus fort, tres bien. Oui.
And I thought that was it. An attempted sale, a rejection, still friends. Would have been the hundredth time today. But no, he wasn't done.
In fact, he hadn't even started.
I can't tell you how this next part began because it happened so quickly that I don't remember. After the briefest of pauses he was suddenly off to the races, philosophizing and telling me his life story all at once. Later in the day we toubabs sat a café to catch our breath and I scribbled down everything I could remember. Here's what he told me, intentionally left in one block paragraph to give you an idea of exactly how it was told to me minus the occasional question I managed to slip in. Imagine it in about 60% French and 40% English, going back and forth from one to the other often in the middle of sentences, a storm of fabric flying around us:
My name is Mwaz. I'm not a rich man but I am happy. How could I not be? I have work and I have my health. Good health. I work hard during the day and I sleep well at night. That's how a man sleeps well at night, you know, it's hard work. Hard work and good sleep, that's what makes you happy. And you need to work hard five or six days a week so you have time to spend with your family and in your garden when you're not working. Those are what makes you happy. Without time for those things a man can't be happy. It doesn't matter how much money you make. You can make a lot of money and be rich but never have time for your family or your heart or your head and you will never be happy. You need to relax. And if you have the time you also need to travel. I know you are a traveler because you are in Dakar so I know I can tell you this and you will understand. A man who doesn't travel wouldn't understand. Travel helps you spread ideas and helps you learn ideas from the places you go. Ideas. Ideas are important. Ideas help you understand yourself and other people, even if you never see them again. A man who doesn't travel and is born and raised in one place and never leaves might think he has a fulfilling life but he will only think that because he doesn't know any better. He won't have any ideas. I was once visited by a man, an Australian man. He spoke only a little French and I didn't speak English. He taught me English. He taught me English because he was in Senegal and had no money and couldn't go anywhere and I helped him. He stayed in my house until he found a job. This was a long time ago, a long long time ago. He came from a family of musicians, he was traveling playing music when he was left alone with no money. He taught me English and I helped him with his French and he got a job playing piano in a jazz band at a hotel downtown. Just down the street there. He played jazz piano on the weekends and regular piano during the week. There was an American band that was playing hotels in West Africa and they came to Dakar to play in the Australian's hotel. The band had a pianist who didn't like Africa and wanted to get out of his contract and go home to America. The Australian took his spot in the band and left Dakar with them and never came back. The Australian wrote me three or four letters but then never again. That was it. I helped him like that and three or four letters and then I never heard from him again. That's fine. I am happy I could help him. My grandfather told me I did the right thing. Even though my grandfather was not happy at first that I brought this man home to help him, in the end he told me I did the right thing. My grandfather was a great man. He was in the army. He used to write me letters when he was traveling in the army. His letters gave me advice on life. He is the one who told me to travel. In his letters he told me about all the places he went and how the army made him realize what is important in life. I still have all his letters. If I had children I wouldn't even tell them anything about anything, I would just give them his letters and tell them to read them. That's what I did myself. I didn't listen to my parents, only to the letters. My parents weren't good people. Children shouldn't always listen to their parents. They should only listen to their parents if their parents if their parents are good, wise people, like my grandfather. If a father strikes his son, the son will then strike his son. My parents tried to teach me bad ways but I didn't listen, I listened to my grandfather and his letters. I still have the letters, I still read them. I took them with me when I was in the army. When I was in the army I was in a war. War is terrible. I saw entire villages bombed by planes in the air. They just exploded in fire and everybody died, just like that. If there were no planes, people were killed by other people. Women and children raped and murdered, men had their legs chopped or shot off so all that was left of them was their chest and up, before they were dead. There's no sense in that. It's not human. The men who did that had no sense. War...it's terrible. And it's caused by people not listening to each other. That's it. That's it. That's all.
The fabric-shoppers were done and heading out the door. I told Mwaz I had to go with them but thanked him for sharing his story with me and that I appreciated his advice. He fuzzily snapped out of his storytelling and asked if I would come to his tree to look at his masks. I said of course. Bien sur. Mom, we have to go look at this guy's masks. I'll tell you why later.
We looked but didn't buy. I told him we'll come back on Wednesday. I really am planning on it. Right here, by the tree? Got it. See you then.
After one more stop and the café break where I jotted my notes, we had to go see Diallo, the man who materialized next to Mom earlier. Mom had said she would go see him and weary as she was, she wanted to keep her word. Bon. Allons-y.
We left the café and Diallo dropped out of the sky to guide us to his shop. Earlier he had said if we wanted to find him we just had to walk down that way, turn left at le pharmacie, turn à gauche encore une fois, and voilà, you will find Diallo.
Not so. In what turned into a fifteen minute walk through a labyrinth of stalls and cars and people on narrow strips of dirt and pavement that weren't quite roads or even sidewalks, we were lead to a large, dark shop. The shop was a large hole in the side of a concrete building. It was at least 40 feet deep into the building but I can't even estimate the exact distance because there were no lights. There were men sewing away on pedal-churned sewing machines amongst piles and piles of fabric and clothes and bags and hats and tablecloths. Some were sitting by the outside, close enough to guide their machines by the sunlight. Others were so deep in the shop that they were in darkness, but they were working away, tapping the pedals, sewing, sewing.
Diallo and his co-salesman were trying to get the female toubabs to venture into the dark depths of the shop but Mama Toubab made it clear that she was not shopping in darkness. There was some negotiating in a slightly better-lit hallway and an agreement was made to come back later, maybe another day, we were all tired. Sure, sure.
Diallo navigated us out of the maze. His buddy followed for a little while, bargaining all the while. He finally decided that he had reached an impasse with Mom and gave up. Diallo was not done, however. His final offer was that he could get Mom the price she was asking if she gave up half in cash today and paid the rest on delivery. Diallo would even bring it to the hotel personally! Tomorrow! We had a quick telepathic Toubab Huddle in the form of shifty glancing and decided that ten bucks was worth the risk, and was at the very least the price of admission for the entertainment if nothing else, if he doesn't come back.
Diallo also offered to take me out tomorrow. Do you like Senegalese music? Sure. Tomorrow I will take you out, you can dance to the Senegalese music, dance with gazelles. Gazelles, did you say gazelles? Yes, gazelles! That sounds mighty fine but I think tomorrow ne marche pas for me. Okay, maybe next time. Yes, peut-etre. See you tomorrow, I will bring the bags! Oui, bien. A demain! A demain, Diallo, a demain.
So that will be tomorrow.
Day one
Our plane landed at about six in the morning. The early hour and the fact that most of the people on our flight were not "disembarking" but rather continuing on to Johannesburg contributed to the relative emptiness of the airport. We breezed through passport control because passport control had no line and we sailed through customs because customs was a guy sitting on a stool by the door. I wonder how long he pretends to read our declaration cards before he throws them away.
Although it was just after six in the morning and only about 20 people disembarked from the plane, there were approximately 40 taxis waiting to whisk us away. This lead to a traditional supply and demand scenario. For those who have forgotten your African economics, this simply means there was a way too big supply of taxis and each driver demanded that his taxi was the right choice for us. I chose the guy whose taxi was first in line because he seemed to know where our hotel was.
To get to our hotel, which is downtown, our taxi had to take a highway. The highway, like a Western highway, has lanes and a speed limit. On its face, it appears normal. However, lanes and a speed limit are merely for a driver's consideration only; helpful but non-binding suggestions. Our driver had no interest in either.
I was interested in the buses we were passing. One of my favorite African sights to behold is the guys hanging off the backs of buses. This is a standard Third World Solution.
Problem: I want to ride the bus but there is no room on the bus.
First World Solution: Wait for the next bus.
Third World Solution: Find something on the back of the bus to hang on to, stand on the bumper, hope for the best.
This is on the highway, mind you. I will get a picture, don't worry.
We drifted back and forth among lanes of traffic until we got to the hotel.
We had previously agreed upon a price of 7,000 CFA. Mom had a bunch of CFA from when we left Cote D'Ivoire so many years ago. (NB: Most of the time I am not going to make the effort to seek out the correct accents, so excuse my Franglais.) She pulled out some bills and handed them to the driver.
"Oh," he said, shaking his head slowly. "Ca ne marche pas." ("This isn't going to cut it, lady.")
"Non?" Mom asked. "On a dit sept mille, oui?" ("What? We said seven thousand, right?")
"Oui, madame. Mais votre argent, c'est ancien. Il a changé. Avez-vous Euros?" ("Yes but your money is old. It has changed. Perhaps you have some Euros?")
Mom looked at me. I didn't have any Euros. Resisting the urge to make a joke about the current state of the global economy, I asked the guy if he would take dollars, half expecting him to laugh at me.
"Oui, bien sur. Comme...vingt." ("I'll take a twenty, sucker.")
This was 50% over the fare we had agreed on but no matter, we were at the hotel. (His "your money is old" story turned out to be accurate. Apparently the currency changed around 1994 and you can no longer get new bills for your old bills.) Since it was before 7am our room was not quite ready so we dumped our stuff at the desk, grabbed some breakfast, and went walking.
Like any good French town, nothing was yet open. The exceptions were little red stands from which young men sell Nescafé. It seemed there was one on every corner. Each one has a huge tub of water (collected from who knows where) and a huge tub of powder (presumably Nescafé). Quite the booming business. Sort of like a lemonade stand for adults.
We saw so much that is so familiar even though I haven't seen it in years and years.
(Some of you will know that a couple years ago I came back to Africa on a trip to Morocco. I did indeed come across many things there that made me remark "Hey! Africa!" but somehow this is different. I don't know if it's West Africa or just Senegal or maybe Morocco is just an outlier itself. For whatever reason, I'm getting a different degree of familiarity here, for random things.)
For instance, the ground. Never level and certainly never clean (though being forever swept by shopkeepers and vendors), there are holes in the pavement everywhere (everywhere there is pavement, anyway). There is trash. There are puddles and piles of undetermined origin and substance. There are cars parked on the sidewalk.
When the cars aren't parked on the sidewalk they are busy trying to run me over. Or at least it seems that way. One is forced to walk in the street because of the sidewalk cars so there is constant danger of becoming roadkill. You have no choice but to get over that real quickly because there's nowhere else to go. Also, you realize (or trick yourself into thinking) that the drivers know what they're doing and that you haven't actually seen anyone get hit, despite the apparent odds.
The approach to traffic intersections is similar. That approach is: whatever. There are no stop signs and certainly no lights. Cars and pedestrians all converging into an intersection at once from all different directions with no one having a right of way over anyone else...and it works. I can't help but think of the bedlam that would result if this took place in DC or any other American city. Lawsuits galore.
It's been a while since I've been a celebrity. When I was a kid it was impossible to walk around without being approached for a handout ("Cadeau! Cadeau!") or being offered a product for sale (a phone card, a magazine, toilet paper). At the very least I could get one or two good stares per block.
Because this phenomenon also happened in India and to some extent in Morocco, I was fully expecting it to happen again here in Dakar. I've gotten some attention but largely have been ignored. It's great. I'm not sure why the change, though. There aren't many white people around, at least not that we've seen, but maybe there are enough to have rendered them (us) uninteresting.
But I think there's more to it than that. I get this sense of defiance from some of the Senegalese who walk by us, like they're making a point of being uninterested. It's not malicious or offensive in any way, understand. It's just striking to me because it's so utterly different to what it was like when I was younger. Maybe as a kid I only noticed the people who noticed me because kids are self-centered that way. Maybe more of the Senegalese really are just more used to having white people around. Who knows. It has been almost 20 years, after all. Maybe more will come to light the more we walk around.
After coming back from walking and finally moving into our hotel room, Mom and I went to lunch at Le Point d'Interrogation ("The Question Mark") (pictures on the Twitter), a hole in the wall right next to our hotel and coincidentally an old favorite of certain Americans who used to live here many years ago. Poulet yassa and lotte brochettes -- hit the spot.
We wasted time walking around some more and having a couple drinks until dinner, which was at another old favorite, Chez Loutcha. Enormous menu and enormous portions, all very good. Fish on attieke, mutton in peanut sauce, and calamari in some sauce I had never had before. Lots of rice. Big Flag beer. Fat and happy.
This morning the call to prayer woke me up right around way-too-early o'clock. I had forgotten about that. I also forgot to brush my teeth last night with bottled water (sorry, intestines). We're heading to lunch soon and then the marché. I'll have to ready my bargaining chops and break out the Franglais in all its bastardized, Frankenstein glory. We'll see which lasts longer, my French or my digestive system.
Although it was just after six in the morning and only about 20 people disembarked from the plane, there were approximately 40 taxis waiting to whisk us away. This lead to a traditional supply and demand scenario. For those who have forgotten your African economics, this simply means there was a way too big supply of taxis and each driver demanded that his taxi was the right choice for us. I chose the guy whose taxi was first in line because he seemed to know where our hotel was.
To get to our hotel, which is downtown, our taxi had to take a highway. The highway, like a Western highway, has lanes and a speed limit. On its face, it appears normal. However, lanes and a speed limit are merely for a driver's consideration only; helpful but non-binding suggestions. Our driver had no interest in either.
I was interested in the buses we were passing. One of my favorite African sights to behold is the guys hanging off the backs of buses. This is a standard Third World Solution.
Problem: I want to ride the bus but there is no room on the bus.
First World Solution: Wait for the next bus.
Third World Solution: Find something on the back of the bus to hang on to, stand on the bumper, hope for the best.
This is on the highway, mind you. I will get a picture, don't worry.
We drifted back and forth among lanes of traffic until we got to the hotel.
We had previously agreed upon a price of 7,000 CFA. Mom had a bunch of CFA from when we left Cote D'Ivoire so many years ago. (NB: Most of the time I am not going to make the effort to seek out the correct accents, so excuse my Franglais.) She pulled out some bills and handed them to the driver.
"Oh," he said, shaking his head slowly. "Ca ne marche pas." ("This isn't going to cut it, lady.")
"Non?" Mom asked. "On a dit sept mille, oui?" ("What? We said seven thousand, right?")
"Oui, madame. Mais votre argent, c'est ancien. Il a changé. Avez-vous Euros?" ("Yes but your money is old. It has changed. Perhaps you have some Euros?")
Mom looked at me. I didn't have any Euros. Resisting the urge to make a joke about the current state of the global economy, I asked the guy if he would take dollars, half expecting him to laugh at me.
"Oui, bien sur. Comme...vingt." ("I'll take a twenty, sucker.")
This was 50% over the fare we had agreed on but no matter, we were at the hotel. (His "your money is old" story turned out to be accurate. Apparently the currency changed around 1994 and you can no longer get new bills for your old bills.) Since it was before 7am our room was not quite ready so we dumped our stuff at the desk, grabbed some breakfast, and went walking.
Like any good French town, nothing was yet open. The exceptions were little red stands from which young men sell Nescafé. It seemed there was one on every corner. Each one has a huge tub of water (collected from who knows where) and a huge tub of powder (presumably Nescafé). Quite the booming business. Sort of like a lemonade stand for adults.
We saw so much that is so familiar even though I haven't seen it in years and years.
(Some of you will know that a couple years ago I came back to Africa on a trip to Morocco. I did indeed come across many things there that made me remark "Hey! Africa!" but somehow this is different. I don't know if it's West Africa or just Senegal or maybe Morocco is just an outlier itself. For whatever reason, I'm getting a different degree of familiarity here, for random things.)
For instance, the ground. Never level and certainly never clean (though being forever swept by shopkeepers and vendors), there are holes in the pavement everywhere (everywhere there is pavement, anyway). There is trash. There are puddles and piles of undetermined origin and substance. There are cars parked on the sidewalk.
When the cars aren't parked on the sidewalk they are busy trying to run me over. Or at least it seems that way. One is forced to walk in the street because of the sidewalk cars so there is constant danger of becoming roadkill. You have no choice but to get over that real quickly because there's nowhere else to go. Also, you realize (or trick yourself into thinking) that the drivers know what they're doing and that you haven't actually seen anyone get hit, despite the apparent odds.
The approach to traffic intersections is similar. That approach is: whatever. There are no stop signs and certainly no lights. Cars and pedestrians all converging into an intersection at once from all different directions with no one having a right of way over anyone else...and it works. I can't help but think of the bedlam that would result if this took place in DC or any other American city. Lawsuits galore.
It's been a while since I've been a celebrity. When I was a kid it was impossible to walk around without being approached for a handout ("Cadeau! Cadeau!") or being offered a product for sale (a phone card, a magazine, toilet paper). At the very least I could get one or two good stares per block.
Because this phenomenon also happened in India and to some extent in Morocco, I was fully expecting it to happen again here in Dakar. I've gotten some attention but largely have been ignored. It's great. I'm not sure why the change, though. There aren't many white people around, at least not that we've seen, but maybe there are enough to have rendered them (us) uninteresting.
But I think there's more to it than that. I get this sense of defiance from some of the Senegalese who walk by us, like they're making a point of being uninterested. It's not malicious or offensive in any way, understand. It's just striking to me because it's so utterly different to what it was like when I was younger. Maybe as a kid I only noticed the people who noticed me because kids are self-centered that way. Maybe more of the Senegalese really are just more used to having white people around. Who knows. It has been almost 20 years, after all. Maybe more will come to light the more we walk around.
After coming back from walking and finally moving into our hotel room, Mom and I went to lunch at Le Point d'Interrogation ("The Question Mark") (pictures on the Twitter), a hole in the wall right next to our hotel and coincidentally an old favorite of certain Americans who used to live here many years ago. Poulet yassa and lotte brochettes -- hit the spot.
We wasted time walking around some more and having a couple drinks until dinner, which was at another old favorite, Chez Loutcha. Enormous menu and enormous portions, all very good. Fish on attieke, mutton in peanut sauce, and calamari in some sauce I had never had before. Lots of rice. Big Flag beer. Fat and happy.
This morning the call to prayer woke me up right around way-too-early o'clock. I had forgotten about that. I also forgot to brush my teeth last night with bottled water (sorry, intestines). We're heading to lunch soon and then the marché. I'll have to ready my bargaining chops and break out the Franglais in all its bastardized, Frankenstein glory. We'll see which lasts longer, my French or my digestive system.
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