Whoa. America is just like I left it! I'm still in the holy-crap-hot-water-and-paved-streets phase and am trying to deal with reverse culture shock and about a hundred people who want me to sum up Senegal in six words, and even though this was expected, it's haaaard. So, time to finish this thing up, I guess.
I had to take care of a lot of goodbyes and figure out stuff for Paris and coming home in the days before I left. I went to the market as well to spend my last CFA and bargained for some woven fabric for my mom. I had 12000 CFA left and the guy wanted 27000 which was of course much too high a price but I literally could not spend more than 11000. I believe I got a really great deal which involved him urging me to lower the price I would pay and me actually giving the guy all of the money I had left in my wallet except for what I needed to get to the airport. A most successful last bargaining experience. The night before I left Dakar I went with Spencer to see his drum teacher's djembe ballet. It was in Bopp in the youth center which was difficult to explain to the taxi driver who did not speak any French and so it took a good half hour of driving around and asking people before we got there. The rehearsal was in a tiny tiled room and I can't imagine how any of the participants are going to hear anything in about ten years because it was so loud and echoey that my ears rang for a good three days afterwards. These women dance like nothing I've ever seen before. There were about eight or nine of them and it was run just like our dance class only loads more complicated and energetic. I got some great videos with my camera. At one point I ended up dancing with them, one girl taught me a few steps and we did it together, then I soloed during one of the sort of jam sessions. It was one of the coolest things I did in Dakar. Later that night I had my last dinner with the family and then went out with JB to Nando's. He thought I was planning to drink a lot with him (what? come on, JB) and was surprised and a little disappointed when I told him I had to get up at 6 so all I wanted was a soda. It was the usual awkward French conversation and the beginnings of saying goodbye...
In the morning I got up, at 6, and went over to Becky's to say goodbye to Lucy and Ryan who are currently traveling for 3 weeks in the desert of Mauritania, who the heck knows why. They are wearing headshawls and turbans, respectively, nobody talks to Lucy cause she's a woman, and since few people actually speak French they are getting by with Wolof, Spanish (oddly enough) and many hand gestures. They are very brave. It was a lovely and sad goodbye. Soon after that I went home to pack and say goodbye to the family. After feeding me a sort of lonely meal since it was too early for dinner, they came with me to the curb and saw me off in the taxi, where I cried my way to the airport next to a very confused driver. I gave him the extra change - JB had spent a good ten minutes arguing over 200 CFA - 1800 versus 2000 - which I ended up just giving the driver anyways, explaining that I was leaving the country. Oh well.
The airport was very odd, and the flight even weirder - there were 12 of us on the same flight and a bunch of us managed to sit all together and freak out about everything. The Paris airport involved a lot of waiting and running around to help Sam and Kate store their bags before they went to London. Matt's flight was delayed because of a Tornado in New Jersey, of all things, so I waited with them a couple of hours and we were ecstatic over giant chocolate muffins and coffee but couldn't deal with the outrageous Euro prices. Then they were off to London, and I to wait at the gate for Matt. Forty-five minutes of breath-holding as people came one by one through the tinted glass doors, and then we sort of blinked at each other, stunned, and five minutes later everything was about the same as it was before I left, and then...we spent a week in Paris!
I'm not going to give you the day-to-day breakdown, but I'll say that we walked all over the city, met up with friends, and saw everything you're supposed to see as a tourist. Including: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, that weird obelisk, Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, the cemetery, the Luxembourg Gardens, les Invalides, the Rodin museum, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysees, Saint-Germain des Pres, the Pompidou Center, and a hundred other things. We'd just sort of pore over the map, pick a place, and walk there. And if there was anything in between that looked interesting, we'd go there too. One day I think we walked about fifteen miles. We also went to a really nice Vietnamese restaurant at the suggestion of Matt's parents which was delicious but upon getting there it turned out they didn't take credit or debit cards and we didn't have enough cash to have a full dinner. Oh well, next time. We met up with some friends, rather miraculously since very few of us had any means of communication on us. A few people from my program were there as well as a friend from Brown studying there for the semester who took us to a great Sangria bar. We were hoping to take the metro home before it closed as it was kind of far but even though we ran, we were a bit too late to make the second connection and had to walk a ways home anyway. The whole time I was a little blown away by Western civilization and a little giddy over reconnecting after some months away, but in general it was a marvelous trip and a good transition back. From the colony to the colonizer, woohoo!
The flight home was fine and the parental reunion at the airport was lovely. I had a few whirlwind days at home, though nothing terribly huge happened other than a small dinner party with ridiculous amounts of great homemade food loaded with dairy and vegetables, and a lot of hanging around relaxing and reconnecting and attempting to get over the jet lag. Then Matt and I caught a ride up to Providence with some friends, and here I am in his room, after two ridiculous days of saying hello to a hundred people and seeing the streets of Providence full of fifteen thousand people here for graduation and reunions (Brown does them at the same time). Today's been quite the day of short meaningless exchanges and revisiting hangouts that are now overrun with everyone and their mother here for the weekend. It's all a little too much, but I'm getting better at summing things up in a sentence and am trying to stay calm and patient and positive. I ran into a friend who was in Senegal last semester, and she gave me some words of wisdom on readjustment. It's odd jumping back into the drama and conversational patterns that I left almost six months ago, thinking that somewhere in there is a totally different Lili than the one who left this town in December, but knowing that outwardly I'm pretty much the same to everyone who saw me off. I expressed this to one friend at the gates of a fifteen-thousand person yearly graduation party called the Brown Campus Dance, who in a rather intoxicated state (as most tend to be at said event) told me it might help to look at myself in a full-length mirror for ten minutes daily just for the reminder that I'm in the same body, after all. I opted out of the Brown Campus Dance.
So. So that's it, then. Alxamdulilaay. Writing this and knowing there are readers out there among the people who care about me has brought me great joy and forced me into a sense of perspective even hours after any bout of insanity that went down in that great and grimy city called Dakar. It is at the moment above all a comfort to know that I don't have to start from square one with everyone. It is going to be rather a task to resume life as it was, and I'm still unreasonably hopeful that from somewhere within will emerge that one perfect sentence that can communicate everything I did and observed and how it has transformed me. I am slightly shocked to find that aside from a killer tan, these changes have not manifested themselves in a tremendous and glaringly obvious way. I feel a little bit new and slightly baffled by this marvelous and terrible nation in which I have come back to things like hot water, gender equity, toilet paper, some semblance of racial equality, and breakfast cereal. In light of these luxuries that I will probably go back to taking for granted, I am terrified that what has changed in me is so subtle that I will start to forget. But oh! I can with some certainly rely on that miraculous piece of modern genius called the Internet to keep watch over this compilation of memories, which contains almost every single thing I have lived and wondered at and stored away for these four and a half months and which I can take out and mull over from time to time for as long as I like. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to read this. It means a lot - when anyone tells me they've followed my blog I know I don't have to struggle for that sentence to sum it all up because, well, all the words are here.
In hopes that you find peace -
Lili
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