Adventure.

My new favorite word.

A while ago I got a pretty useful email with this quote "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered." (Jarama, Paul).

I think I've become really good at rightly considering things. It's simple to make anything into an adventure here. For one thing, daily life is clearly different from anything I'm used to, and constantly exciting. For another, calling something an adventure makes me (probably overly) proud of myself.

On Thursday I had a great adventure. I took my first car rapide, and with another first timer - not even with a Senegalese friend to keep me from making mistakes! That added to the legitimacy of the adventure - being two Toubabs working our way through the public transportation in Dakar. I'm not sure if I paid the right amount, or asked for the stop in the correct manner, but I made it to the supermarket and back during my lunch break on Thursday, with plenty of time to rest up before my last dance class.


The yellow bus to the left/back is a car rapide. You climb in the back, then jump off when the bus slows down a little for your stop. Good thing traffic is so heavy though, that the car rapide can never really go fast enough to make jumping off too intimidating.

I went to the store with Alisa to get supplies to make a cake for our homestay families. I came back with a chocolate box mix, and two packets of vanilla pudding (excellent recipe, merci Lizzy). I mixed this with some powdered milk, and cooked it in a sort of pot for making rice (after I cleaned out the dead bugs and rotting vegetables - our SIT kitchen is not the most sufficiently stocked...), and created something my family ended up actually liking (or at least saying they liked). I gave myself more adventure points for this.

Friday I had some more wonderful adventures. Half day of class = Voile d'Or again (one of the many paradise beaches I've been to so far). I did some great studying all afternoon, really analyzing the correct direction to lay for maximum - but not too much, don't worry Mom - sun exposure. I'm becoming a great student of nature.

Other adventures...

Ethiopian fine dining with three students from my group, and one journalist from NY. The restaurant is just a few blocks from our SIT classroom, is incredibly gorgeous, and makes you feel comfortably comatose afterwards.

The car we took to the waterfalls during our Kedougou visit. I'm there on the left, leaning forward past Abby. There were four of us in the back, three in the middle, and two in the front. Sometimes I miss my subaru.