There are no Irish in Senegal

Well maybe a few, but they certainly did not go to the one Irish Pub in Dakar last night.

The holiday began well. Class started at 10:30, so we made fried plantains before. Any down time = food, I guess. Abby, Alisa and I bought the fruit from my husband's stand down the corner (for $1), sugar from the boutique/snack shack/cell phone credit/choco-bread stand across from our school office, and found a relatively clean pan in the kitchen.

Maybe not quite like those at Pambiche...


...but this was after a LOT were eaten. The sugar was key. I am a serious toggkat now (chef). (The girl on the right, Alisa, is wearing her shirt she dyed in the batik workshop a few weeks ago. I think it turned out pretty incredibly. You will note that there will never be a picture of me in mine).

After lunch we had our art workshop at the Village des Arts. I was in the bronze workshop...which was as much a misnomer as "Le Celtic" Irish pub. (It was as Irish as the Ethiopian restaurant).

We never actually saw any bronze, but it was incredible all the same. I learned the way you make a bronze sculpture is to create a shape in wax, which will then be cast in plaster, the wax is melted and the remaining plaster shape is filled with the bronze.

So, I was supposed to create something out of wax. I tried a hand. I really can't understand why, thinking about it now. I don't even like my own hands. Since when are hands something I can draw? on paper? in two dimensions with a pencil and many erasers?

We'll see in a month when we get the sculptures at the final semester party. By then maybe I'll have forgotten I made a hand, and I'll appreciate the bronze bowl-like figure I've made...


This was our station for three days. The green is a gas tank used to heat up the wax so it was supposedly malleable...I also have no pictures of the hand.


Yes more food. Snack after the strenuous two-hour art class, at La Gondole. Their ketchup and mustard is so classy, and they sell the best ginger juice by the goblet.

Nothing really exciting to show. I should start stealing more pictures so you have something more to look at. Just my non-Irish St. Patrick's Day. I think the pub did have an Irish flag, and it was called a "pub."