Ok, so I found my host family in Yoff. Well, they’re not exactly a family quite yet. It’s a young couple, in their 30s probably. The guy, Dominique, is from Montreal and the girl, Fatou, is from Yoff, a northern suburb of Dakar, where the airport is. They both work at CRESP and are slated to be married in September of this year. They have a pretty nice and new apartment by local standards, including a real oven, which I’ve never seen in Senegal before.<\/p>\n
Dominique, or Ysau (his Wolof name), is a converted Muslim and has lived in Senegal for the past year and change, full-time. He’s a programmer by trade and showed me a version of Firefox that he’s been working on in Wolof, which is pretty cool. Fatou, meanwhile, is a teacher’s assistant in a class for American students learning about mircrocredit at CRESP. She’s the first Senegalese person that I’ve ever met who doesn’t like tea. She can make it, but she won’t touch the stuff.<\/p>\n
I managed to find an ATM that does work and withdrew some money and got a Senegalese SIM card for my phone. Now all I need is some regular WiFi access, and I’ll be set. Fatou said that CRESP has WiFi, so hopefully when Mamadou gets back from Mecca tomorrow evening, I’ll be able to use the WiFi there to work and call the States.<\/p>\n
In related news, Internet prices have indeed dropped since the last time I was here. Within a five minute walk from the house, I found three cybercafes — two of them charge 300 CFA (about sixty cents) per hour and another charged 250 CFA. Four years ago most cybers were closer to 500 and you found the occasional one at 300.<\/p>\n
Basically, it’s been a lazy Sunday so far. I hope to really get rolling tomorrow, or at the latest by Tuesday, after Mamadou gets back.<\/p>\n
A Senegalese kid in this cyber just stood up and is wearing an A’s t-shirt and I can hear a goat bleating in the street just outside. Randomness still ensues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ok, so I found my host family in Yoff. Well, they’re not exactly a family quite yet. It’s a young couple, in their 30s probably. The guy, Dominique, is from Montreal and the girl, Fatou, is from Yoff, a northern suburb of Dakar, where the airport is. They both work at CRESP and are slated to be married in September of this year. They have a pretty nice and new apartment by local standards, including a real oven, which I’ve…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[169,199],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-senegal","category-travels","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-jE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}