Dafa tang foofu! - It's hot there!

So, in my last 11 minutes on this rickety computer I'm going to try to explain where I'm off to next week.

We have a one week break from classes to scatter away from Dakar and my friends Jenise and Maren and I (and apparently a good deal of others) are scattering off to rather rural southeast Senegal. Tomorrow we will attempt to board a 'sept place' - small station wagon bush taxi - and will swerve through 8 hours of ?foie de gnis? (pot holes) to get to Tambakounda in the south, then a smoother 4 to Kedougou.

In Kedougou we hope to meet my Senegalese uncle, who teaches English, and hopefully find the Peace Corps center. If we're lucky, we'll be able to rent bikes. (the kind with rubber tires and perhaps even breaks!) After that our plans kind of break up into a vague slushy of pipe-dreams: Bike into Guinea to the market at Mali; swim under the waterfall at ?Binginfufi?, perhaps make it to the remote eastern villages, many of which are from the Bassari ethnicity and are still animist.

So I'm fresh back from the centre-ville, where my very calm, sweet uncle Denis took me to get my hair cut. The shortest, straightest thing to be found on my head since early high school. Still, sitting in a rickity old elevated barbers chair, a burly Cape Verdian meticulously going over my head with at least 3 pairs of scissors and 3 razors, one of which was the real, old fashioned, sharp kind. I was shivering with thrill at the experience, and the fear of blood-born illness the whole time. Hearing his philosophy on cutting hair in English and creole Portugese to the amusement of my uncle was a memorable experience.

And I feel more prepared with this short mop, along with a large straw hat (which looks a lot more 'gaucho' than 'baaykat'), for the promise that no person has failed to give us about Kedougou. Dafa tang! - It's hot!