Hey readers! ...Hopefully there are some.
Well I'm finally into the second semester of the program and I'm on the home stretch with 2 1/2 months to go! French has improved a lot, but not enough according to the professors here. I now use Wolof during all my purchases and almost every conversation I make with Senegalese outside of my host family, and due to that, the prices of things have fallen drastically :) My skills at playing djembe have improved quite a bit as well due to the large amount of free time I had during Christmas vacation. I finally found a non-Catholic Francophone Church in the city which I've started frequenting instead of it's Anglophone counterpart.
Over Christmas break, I traveled as much as I could. I ended up doing some day trips to small cities not to far from the capital city, Dakar. I visited the cities of Thies, Mbour, Kaolack, Joal. I also did two bigger trips, one to the country known as The Gambia and another to the southern, more dangerous region of Senegal which is called the Casamance. In The Gambia, I actually got to see wild animals like moneys, hyenas and crocodiles! It's tropical and rainforesty in the south which is why I really wanted to see that area (I live in Subsaharan Africa, basically desert.) I actually traveled with a Senegalese friend to the Casamance which was cool, but I did have to pay for him in everything we did ...but he provided us with a family to stay with, which included eating and sleeping ...so it was worth it. I actually don't have any pictures from the Casamance because my camera decided not to work during my time there, I was so bummed!!! ...I got a bunch from The Gambia though. For Christmas, I bought my travel buddy, Garret, his petite dejeuner and we celebrated by staying in the Catholic mission at Kaolack and going to Catholic mass in French. Wahooo. Here's a few pictures!
Mbour - Mafe, Lunch
Our mode of transportation-The guy in the middle is the definition of Teranga - me touching a crocodile
