Day 2-3 African market

After I wrote last night I had dinner. The hotel has a small restaurant downstairs. There are never more than a dozen people there. The food is delicious as they cook everything in a wood fired stove on the spot. Last night I had marinated chicken with potatoes and a citrus-y salad with more red wine. There were 3 French people about my age eating at the next table. They asked me what I ordered, we got to talking, in Franglish, and I joined them for dinner. They were traveling from Spain through Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauritania and were going to finish their trip in Dakar. It was a very nice conversation apart from their chain smoking.

After dinner I went back to my room, dragged a chair out on the patio, set the shortwave radio to the BBC World Service which came in crackly, turned out the lights and just took it in. The first hour was Muslim evening prayer and the 4 or 5 mosques in this area were chanting up a storm. Now I knew about the call of the muezzin but always assumed it lasted just a few minutes. Nope. It lasts nearly an hour. Some of the chanting is very shouty but there are a couple chanters who can really carry a tune. It is Arabesque but very musical. Think of what it would be like if 5 churches around you decided to broadcast their entire service over loudspeakers at the same time. It's a real cacophony - 5 times a day and quite loud. I have recorded a few examples of this using my camera's video recorder but this little laptop can't handle audio and video processing, so you'll have to wait until I get home. But it really adds an air of rich strangeness to the place. I feel like I am in the French foreign legion.

The chanting and the BBC stopped at about the same time. I looked for another station on the shortwave and could only find the Voice of America Africa Service, which I could stomach for about 10 minutes. (Please, President Obama, do something about the VOA. People here depend on it and it is now a neo-con propaganda mill.) The other alternative was China Radio International which always bores me to tears so I switched to a local station which was playing uptempo music which I can only describe as Islamic gospel. It was pop music with lots of the "Allah this", "Allah that" and "Inshallah" every few phrases (Those are the only 2 words in Arabic I know.) The breeze made the evening cool enough where I needed a heavier shir andt the stars were amazing. You could see the Milky Way, the Seven Sisters and an occasional shooting star. I just sat there and enjoyed the sights, sounds and smells for a few hours before bed.

This morning I got up and walked down across the Eiffel Bridge to the mainland. The Eiffel Bridge was built a decade earlier than the Eiffel Tower in Paris by the same Eiffel. It was originally intended for the Danube, but the French packed it up, shipped it here and it has traversed the main channel of the Senegal River since 1896. Now it is a rusty affair, literally falling apart before your eyes (there was a piece of a girder lying in the road backing up traffic.) But it is heavily used by both car and foot traffic.

On the mainland is the African market. The surprise here was that I could walk through it relatively unpestered. This is where Africans go to buy television sets, cellphones and what-have-you so maybe white tourists were off the radar. There were also goat herders pushing their livestock through the crowds dressed in Bedouin clothing. It's hard to convey the bustle of the place. It was busy! One stereotype that is certainly not true is the notion that Africans are lazy. Not in a million years. They are the hardest working, most entrepreneurial people I have seen. They are smart and they are persistent. If historical circumstances were a bit different they would dominate the world.

The market was amazing. I would have stood there and just watched it for hours but there is too much activity and standing still meant you were in someone's or some animal's way. So I walked back and forth the 5 long blocks or so and just took it all in. I bought some more bottled water, breakfast biscuits and a traditional bracelet all for 10 000 francs (about $20US) and walked back to my room. I have used up all my CFA francs and need to go to the bank and exchange some euro tomorrow.

Tonight I will eat at the hotel restaurant again. There is a Halal (Islamically correct) pizza that intrigues me. More photos on flickr.