Tag Archives: study abroad

Blazer time!

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Blazers!

I accomplished one of the things on my 21-year-old list ‘o planned accomplishments (“bucket list” makes me want to gag)! Thanks to Ousmane, my previously-mentioned and super-awesome tailor, I now have what is—as far as I’m concerned—the perfect blue blazer. Why?

1. It’s wool with silk lining, meaning that it’s quite warm and I won’t be tempted to machine wash it. Plus, natural fibers.

2. It actually fits my weirdly-hunchy shoulders. Also my chest. Also my waist. Also all of me, he is magic. (I was discussing the tailor with someone yesterday and we decided that most of our delight with his work comes from the “I gave him something flat and he made it something three-dimemsional!” shock. Every time, this man.)

3. He interfaced the back collar so it stands up and doesn’t do the cheap jacket thing where it rolls under and dies. (I know that cheap jackets do this because all of mine do.) Continue reading →

Host Compound of Unusually Spiked Emotions

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Today was a weird day. I found out after class that my dog was put down last night. This further confirms my theory that no conversation started by my father with “Hey Em” (or “Hey kid,”) ever ends without something horrible happening in it.

Linguistic weirdness aside, I didn’t think this was a particularly sad thing. The dog was very old for a greyhound, and had been very sick for a long time. She was put down at home, and as far as doggy lives go she lived a remarkably good one. I was bummed out, but we all knew it was coming.

Then I returned to the host compound of unusually spiked emotions, where–after my host mother told me she was going to whip me so I learn Wolof, because that is the way to make your host child less scared of you of course–I spent most of lunch trying not to cry. (Which, to be fair, not the first time that this has happened. This is just the first time that the reason for the tears wasn’t in the room while I was eating.)

After I finished lunch (and the subsequent mostly-joking fight with my host mom about how I hadn’t eaten enough), I retreated to my room, where I broke down sobbing.

So that was unexpected. Continue reading →

Fiber Optic Umbilical Cords

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Me in a fly dress.

My tailor is magic!

But the other weird flipside of that is that people expect you to be able to be fairly immersed in your at-home life while you are abroad. This happens on both a social (“why haven’t you uploaded Facebook photos yet?”) and academic (“you need to register for classes/apply to the honors program/find your summer internship”) level.This has been a weirdly America-focused week for me. When people talk about the dangers of technology while going abroad, they seem to be focused on you withdrawing—staying on Facebook (or blogging, ahem) rather than engaging with wherever you are. This happens, of course, and I’m guiltier of it than most.

After a minor existential crisis earlier this week, I decided to pursue an honor’s thesis for the coming year. Because you’re required to file all of that paperwork before April, this has meant that I’ve spent a lot of this week writing in English, to other English-speakers, about things I’ll be doing when I’m back at home. Ditto with the very weirdly terrifying experience of asking someone whose work I really like if I could maybe possibly work for them this summer—which requires me being able to email them. Continue reading →

Controlling the Narrative of My Personal Failure

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The squid thinks my tears taste delicious.

The squid of my own personal failure.

So I cried again in Wolof. For those of you playing along at home, we’re up to four sessions of this class in which I have teared up. Given that this is a class that has only met ten times in the last two months, this is Kind of an Issue.

Don’t get me wrong: I do not want to be crying in class. This is not an attention thing. Something about my teacher’s style simply makes my eyes leak tears like a squid squirts ink. (In all fairness to my body, this one saves me a fortune on bleach.)

It’s not that classes haven’t made me cry before. I tear up easily and mostly define my self worth in terms of academic achievement.* But in every occasion that I can think of doing this sort of massively embarrassing thing, it happened after I left the room. Wolof sucks so hard that I literally cannot keep it together while sitting two feet away from my teacher. Continue reading →

I Drank Cheese Tea

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So for school I have this group project. It’s a 20-page paper that is supposed to be written by 7 people in what is for all of us a second language. This is supposed to teach us something about teamwork, or why we should go to business school, or why other countries hate the American educational system or something.

Despite the fact that my group is full of smart, capable people, this project is going about as well as 99% of group projects go, which is to say terribly.

It’s no one’s fault, really. Seven people papers of this length are doomed to fail, because they’re a stupid idea. So when my group decided without me to move away from printing our annotated bibliography* off a Google Doc to a system where we emailed our individual components to a single group member, I happened to vaguely lose it on the poor person who was sent to tell me.**

I feel bad about this, because he is an Exceptionally Nice Person in what appears to be an alarmingly genuine way. You know how I know that he is nice? Because after I lost it on him about five extra minutes of work on my end, he invited me to his Thursday night ataya party.

Seriously, he’s a really nice dude.

Continue reading →

Mo’ Money, No Problems (and a Return to Dakar)

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I love these carts so much.

You guys, I have a new theory: the ratio of happiness gained per dollar spent? (The mo’ money, no problems quotient, as it were.) It is far and away highest in the airport.

You laugh*, but it’s totally true. Take, for example, my trip through Dakar via Paris. Because I was scared that my debit card wouldn’t be approved in a foreign country/I wanted to save money, I refused to buy wireless coverage, real honest-to-god restaurant food, or booze. I wound up sweaty, exhausted, and near tears in the airport bathroom, ready to keel over from exhaustion. Continue reading →

Parents! In Dakar!

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Becca and me, stylin'.

Unrelated to anything in this post, I have a new dress. (I'm the one that looks like Mrs. Frizzle on acid.)

So, my parents are in Dakar. It’s both delightful (I have missed them! They are staying in a swank hotel that looks like an Indiana Jones set!) and strange (They don’t speak French! Everyone thinks my dad is German for unknown reasons!).

Mostly, though, this trip has given me an insight into how little of downtown Dakar I have visited. This is not entirely due to my homebody ways–my program directors have managed to convince me that downtown is full of Riots, All The Time.

It turns out that that’s not true! (Knock on wood.) Mostly downtown Dakar is full of really good (if expensive) food and hilariously unsafe traffic. Also, there’s embassies. Like, twenty of them within a block of our hotel. I can’t tell if there was a meeting about it or if the tax rate in this part of town is great, but this place is internationally bouncing. Continue reading →

Cold Showers are Unpleasant

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Not hair product. Just endless, endless sand.

So apparently my family is reading this blog. Hi, family! Welcome. I’m sorry that this is vaguely incoherently copyedited pretty much always. (Please don’t tell my English professors.)

ANYWAY. Back to what I was thinking about, which was: cold showers. Specifically, the fact that I have been taking one a day for–just checked the calendar–25 days (there were hot showers during orientation)–and I have still in no way grown accustomed to them.

At the beginning, cold showers seemed like a surmountable obstacle. Everyone else here does them, I figured, and so I should be able to too. It’s not like I’m hanging out taking leisurely, thinking-type showers. I’m basically doing a slightly glorified version of hair-face-pits-crotch-feet and bouncing. My mid-back has not seen water in literally two weeks, and I can’t tell if what’s going on back there is dirt or sunburnt skin that won’t peel or what, because it does not contribute to my overall odor factor. Continue reading →

There’s a Frood Who Really Knows Where Her Towel Is

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I have finally accomplished one of the few things that I really needed to do while I was in Dakar: two weeks after moving here, I finally bought a towel.

It was more complicated than you might think. Not all of the population uses towels—instead, the long wrap skirts that women wear to cover their legs when eating also do double duty as something to dry yourself with.

As a result, despite the fact that everyone in the program was on the lookout for me, it took a week for anyone to actually find towels in a store. Even then, that store was in the incredibly swanky mall downtown, and—because rich Dakarois will apparently pay through the nose for stupid things—cost 30,000 CFA ($15.00). For comparison, a large loaf of French bread (the favored breakfast, lunch, and dinner of everyone in the city) costs 100 CFA ($.20).

So, not wanting to pay through the nose for a towel—not to mention the cab fare that it would take to get to the insane mall and back—I bided my time. In the interim, I air dried and used a scarf that I had brought when I absolutely needed to dry my hair or wipe toothpaste grossness from my chin. (I am the sexiest international traveler.)
Continue reading →

Awkward Moments in Cross-Cultural Communication

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At lunch today, I realized that the maid who works in my host family’s house does not speak French. This is somewhat embarrassing, given that I’ve been living here for a week.

We had been getting along just fine with gestures and avoided eye contact. It turns out “no, that doesn’t go there,” and “I find it funny that you cannot ever light the stove,” are messages that can be conveyed totally without words. I had assumed that the rest of the time she was just busy or shy.

But no, it turns out that she has avoided talking to me because we do not share a mutually intelligible language. Whoops.
Continue reading →