CRESP<\/a> begins along a pathway more than a road, although taxis will frequently drive one it. The sand itself is a rich ochre, almost like a bronzed version of the stuff found on the beaches of Souther California, and it’s everywhere. Given that everyone has sandals, I don’t quite understand how everyone deals with getting the soles of their feet all gritty all the time, but I suppose when you grow up with it, you don’t really have much of an alternative. I’ve learned to simply walk in the ruts and the wakes left by the wheels of the horse carts, because the sand there is packed down a little further and doesn’t get into my Birkenstocks. <\/p>\nBut of course, sand in my shoes is probably the least offensive of my worries. About 10 steps to the left of the front door of the apartment building is a left turn down another dusty trail that jags diagonally toward the main road — it’s lined on one side with a small horse and goat pen. Occasionally they’re let out, and meander into the road, and take care of their own business wherever they please. One quickly learns to avoid stepping near dark clumps of sand. <\/p>\n
From there, it’s probably another 20 or 30 steps to the main intersection of the immediate neighborhood, although that’s probably a bit of an overstatement. There’s two somewhat large sandy streets that meet in a perfectly perpendicular arrangement. The one that goes to the right takes me toward the main avenue in these parts, the Route de l’a\u00c3\u00a9roport. <\/p>\n
This is my main drag, each day, as I make my way from the comfort zone of the apartment, to the comfort zone of CRESP, with its reliable electricity, WiFi, and toilet paper in the bathrooms (the vast majority of Senegalese don’t use toilet paper, so if you need some, you’d better make sure that you’re rockin’ your own roll each time you’re out and about). <\/p>\n
There’s a small bakery stand on one side, with a handful of customers there to buy morning bread. I’m not sure what everyday Senegalese did before the French introduced the custom of drinking coffee (now limited mostly to Nescaf\u00c3\u00a9) and eating baguettes in the morning. Of course, I’m not talking about the lush, foamy delicious baguettes that you can find in Parisian boulangeries (or even in Berkeley Bowl), but rather dry, stuff, and just bland baguettes. These are probably the cheapest baguettes on the planet, in quality and price. It’s about $0.20 for one — but each day, for breakfast, we have a good six-inch hunk of it per person, along with the option of Nescaf\u00c3\u00a9, S\u00c3\u00a9n\u00c3\u00a9cao (local hot chocolate powder), Nido (local milk powder). <\/p>\n
And for some reason, the vendors won’t just give you your bread in a plastic bag or a baguette-sized bag, rather, they’ll give it do you wrapped in a quarter sheet of newspaper. Typically, Arabic-language newspapers — because no one here reads Arabic, so it’s cheaper? — do the job nicely. But it’s not even a full wrap to protect your bread from the elements, but rather, just a small layerto give you something to hang on to, so your sweaty hands don’t touch the bread directly. <\/p>\n
Further on down the road is an assortment of small food stalls, horse drawn carts, rusted and aging yellow taxis beeping (I can never figure out if they beep in order to warn pedestrians that they’re coming, or as a way to solicit customers, or perhaps both) and of course, the ubiquitous “boutiques.” You couldn’t swing a sheet of indigo without hitting at least half a dozen boutiques in this country, particularly in Dakar. <\/p>\n
Boutiques typically are stocked from floor to ceiling with every imagineable bit of consumable good, ranging from powdered milk, to batteries, to packets of tissues, to bottled water. They’re dark, enveloping places, where it feels like as you walk in, you’re on some holy ground, like an altar, as basically the only square foot that isn’t stacked with a consumer product. Pretty much every day or every two days I pop in a neighborhood boutique and buy 1.5 L of bottled water and two packets of Kleenex (I use them as toilet paper), all for a little over a dollar. <\/p>\n
Between my house and CRESP there’s probably at least half a dozen boutiques — and that’s just along the route that I happen to take. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
January 19, 2007 I’ve been in Senegal for about a week now and most things are sort of how they were when I was last here four years ago. Jeez, I can’t even believe that it’s been four years already. Four years? That’s the length of time between presidential elections, the Olympics and the World Cup. That’s how long I was an undergraduate. Four years? And yet here I am, ready to negotiate with taxi drivers in Wolof of a…<\/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-1221","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-jH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1221","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=1221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}