Weekend of Dancing

It all started Thursday night at dinner with Pap. I had a fellow CIEEer over for supper since his prof in the states knows my host dad here. Somewhere in the dinner conversation we discovered we're all closet oldies lovers, and the night somehow ended in the three of us alone in the living room break-ing-it-down to Pap's best collection of disco hits. This was the perfect precurser to my weekend.

Friday was filled with many adventures--including my first hamburger in probably 3+ years! It was a heart attack in a bun, I'm telling you. Beef patty, a whole omlette, ketchup and fries all on one sandwhich. And that was the "hamburger normal"! So good, though. It weighed at least a pound on its own. But that was our dinner pre-dance concert at the Institut Francais in downtown Dakar. We had about two hours of the most INCREDIBLE break dancers--absolutely unreal, it was the coolest thing to watch!--and also unbelieveable traditional Senegalese dancers.

Throughout the concert I put a lot of thought into how one would describe Senegalese dance without actually demonstrating (which I am totally incapable of)... the best I can do is this: imagine you're practicing karate moves on a bed of super hot coals and you have fire ants in your pants. I'm serious. That's kind of what Senegalese dancing looks like. Frantic. What makes it incredible is that it requires a RIDICULOUS amount of energy, stamina, athleticism, speed, coordination, etc. and it looks completely frazzled, but when people dance in groups you can clearly see it's not totally sporadic because they're all doing the same moves! It's really something! YouTube it, really... never seen anything like it. But the "spectacle" was AWESOME!

Finished out the night doing our own dancing at a discoteq (sp?) til the wee hours of the morning, then woke up an hour and a half later (ouch!)to catch a bus to Touba Diallo. We (the whole CIEE program) spent our weekend at the most magical looking beach resort there, just a couple hours south of Dakar (actually only 30 miles away, but traffic doesn't move too fast here). There's a big (ooh I'm going to butcher this spelling..) Rostafarian community there... followers of Bob Marley... so lots of dreads and drumming. We had the opportunity to take Senegalese dance classes there, but I opted for the more relaxed batik-making session (painting designs on a cloth with wax then dyeing it--so neat!).

Several of us girls had an oh-so romantic Valentine's Day eve together, spooning outside under blankets with the sound of waves crashing against the rocks below and the most incredible clear starry night sky above us. We laid there exchanging what bits of sky knowledge we've retained from our respective astronomy college classes, pointing out all the constallations and planets we could identify... thanks, liberal arts gen eds! Made for a nice time. But then off to yet another "spectacle" of Senegalese dancing put on by some of the locals--so much, so intense!

I thought I'd have a break from all the dancing when I got home Sunday, but as it happened, my little cousin Mourat had his birthday party at our house... and all our family does at birthday parties is dance! So once again, we delved in and once again I was reminded of how rhythm-deficient I am. My favorite is that if you're bad at dancing here they say you're "toubab"... also the same word for "white person"... they are synonomous. With good reason. By far the highlight though was when my entire family, little cousins to older aunts, all started doing the "stanky leg" dance when that song came on. LOVE Senegalese family birthday parties!

Also, I think I've figured out why Senegalese rarely eat dessert. It's because at birthday parties they eat enough to carry them over for weeks (maybe months?) til it's time to celebrate a year in someone else's life. Seriously. We each had a plate with at least seven different kinds of cookies, plus super sugary and delicious homemade juice. Then came the two different kinds of birthday cake...not to worry, we got slices of both. And after all that, my sister still wanted to make brownies together for Valentine's Day ... :) Rainchecked that, but we still had dinner an hour later.

Uff da.