Dakar

written Saturday, 5 May 2007


I put off writing about last Monday's trip to Dakar because it left me in such a bad mood that I needed time to cool off before I could write fairly about it.

I don't want to go into a lot of details here, but will just say that bureaucracy is an incredibly frustrating thing. And to top off my frustration in that direction, the pizza which I had been looking forward to for days was the worst pizza I've ever had in my life, and really it can't even be described as pizza. It was just ground meat that tasted like bad meatloaf sitting on bread that was like pita bread, with ketchup and mustard to pour on top of it. No tomato sauce, no cheese. So let's just call it meatloaf on pita. And yes, I ate it because I was starving (since I had made sure not to eat too much breakfast so I would be hungry for the wonderful pizza I was expecting).

To be fair and balance out my complaints about bureaucracy, though, I must report that my petition for women's bikes was responded to positively. Peace Corps is ordering women's seats which anyone who was issued a man's bicycle can request, and future volunteers will be offered women's bicycles.

Also on a positive note, at the end of our long bureaucratic day in Dakar, Peace Corps had the drivers stop off at a French pastry shop and a toubab supermarket before we left Dakar. I won't tell on the other volunteers, but will just report on myself: I ate a "pain au chocolate" (basically a croissant with chocolate in it), a custard-filled donut (best donut of my life), a handful of imitation Pringle's chips, a few bites of ice cream, some gummy worm type things, and probably a few other things that I have forgotten by now, all within about an hour. I don't regret it at all, although I will (somewhat delicately) say that I paid for my unaccustomed junk food splurging with stomach problems for about four days. Totally worth it, though.