Ithaca

[writinghawk]

Since sitting on the roof terrace of the lovely Hotel Djoloff in Dakar last night, I have taken ten contrivances in series to get home

Comments

[lillibet]

Glad you made it through the travel maze.

But what about Dakar?

:)

[writinghawk]

If I were the kind of person to take pictures, they would not have been of the truly titanic but somewhat Stalinist and characterless Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, but of girls in jeans wearing headphones over their headscarves (the population is 95% Muslim), goats in the street, goats on the beach, the amazing fish market starting in the early evening when the pirogues come in in their hundreds and hundreds from fishing, the yellow and black Peugeot taxis which will fall apart if you so much as breathe hard while sitting in them, kids playing football in sand roads, girls on skateboards (I don't remember having seen that in Cambridge), men in the rather fine-looking boubou (a loose long shirt and loose trousers in matching fabric), and not the confrontational alien and obnoxiously expensive Radisson hotel with the pool by the sea but the Djoloff itself, a stylish but unassuming and inviting building in a local idiom, with the staircase in a covered internal courtyard leading all the way up to the third-floor roof terrace with

[lillibet]

What a rich description.

One of the youth of our church spent a year two years ago living in a village in Senegal--he took some amazing photos both there and in Dakar, so I have images of what you're talking about, but the additional sensual imagery is visceral and vital.

The oppressive salesmanship is something we saw in Egypt--worse than anywhere else we've been. We spent quite some time trying to think how they might be encouraged to back off and thereby up the odds of us actually buying something.

Thanks for sharing!

[writinghawk]

I was surprised how much worse it was than I've seen elsewhere. At the marché artisanal, one guy had a t-shirt of Dakar I would actually quite have liked. But he was so relentlessly and unpleasantly adhesive that I couldn't bring myself to buy it from him. All the same I dare say you had it even worse in Egypt, since so far as I know US officials haven't released a travel advisory about the scale of the problem in Senegal.

Living in a village would be a completely different and, I'm sure, amazing experience. Are his photos online?

[lillibet]

You can see a few of them, together with a few blog entries from his time there, at http://globalcitizenyear.org/author/elias-estabrook/.