Trip to Senegal Part 5

Today I went to downtown Dakar. Dakar is a very good size city, but the first thing I noticed about downtown was the way people treat you. In New York City and Chicago, you can walk down the street without anyone bothering you; if you don't interact with them, they won't interact with you. Downtown Dakar is different; there are people all over the place trying to sell you things. When you walk down the street, you can't take five steps without passing someone trying to sell you something. They will shove watches, shirts and cheap jewelry in your face. It takes effort to ignore the people selling things from you and convince them that you won't buy anything they have. However, I'm guessing that they would treat me a lot differently if I was from Senegal.

Other than how determined people were to sell things to me, the other thing I found interesting was the things people tried selling. There was one person who had a little stand he used to sell irons. Here was a person, in downtown Dakar, trying to sell irons on the street.

After spending about an hour walking around downtown Dakar and shopping, my fiancee and I went to a restaurant and ate. The restaurant had a very good atmosphere and the food there was great. I think the food there was the best food I had since I arrived in Senegal and was the best food I had for at least the past half-year. Saying the food was delicious is an understatement.

My fiancee's sister is graduating from high school tomorrow, and as a little pre-celebration, the school had a gathering for the students and family and friends of students, which lasted for around three hours, today. This is the same school that my fiancee went to during some of her high school years, so it was very nice to see the school. It was a lot smaller than I was expecting though. My fiancee had shown me pictures of the school, but for some reason, I always pictured it a little larger than it really is. While we were at the school, teachers were given the opportunity to talk about the seniors who were graduating and say a little something about each student. Of course, since I didn't go to the school and didn't know any of the students, it was not as touching for me as those who were involved. The graduating class was very small and I found it interesting how close everyone was. The high school class I graduated with was much larger; there were a lot of people I graduated with who I didn't know the names of, let alone knew who they really were. The school my fiancee and her sister went to was very different. Each of the students knew each other very well and had a lot of memories with each other, which is very different from my experiences with high school. Visiting the school my fiancee went to brought a good end to the day.