Monday, October 13, 2008

What…you don’t like FONDE, but you’re in Senegal!

Marie Gaye…oh how much Anna, Daniel, and I love our hot mother! She greets Daniel and I by saying “Mes fils…Ça va?” and does a little dance waving her hands in the air. She calls Anna “la reine” and has started to call all of us “bébé” plus our respective name!

***FONDE: yogurt, milt that has been boiled and made into a porridge like soup, & sugar (basically the Senegalese equivalent of porridge)

10/10/2008-DINNER (9PM): We at fonde for dinner… The dish is a very traditional Senegalese meal and is often eaten when people have eaten a heavy lunch or large afternoon meal. It was Anna and my first time eating fonda (Daniel has eaten it a handful of times with his host family in Dakar, and loves it THERE). So, basically, the point of this story is that Marie asked us if we liked the fonde and we all kept saying “ça va, oui, ça va… nous avons déjà mangé un peu chez Codou, notre directrice” and she would respond with, “vous ne l’aimez pas, je ne fait jamais le porridge encore”… we never actually said that we liked the fonde, but we didn’t say we hated it either. I think that Marie could just tell that we were not enjoying our dinner; it even came to a point where she said that she would go to the boulangerie and buy us some bread and make us another meal. We insisted that she not make us another meal and that the fonde was good... in the words of Anna, “We just hit a porridge wall and couldn’t eat it anymore.” Marie will not be making us fonde anymore, or at least we think… We all felt terrible after dinner, but in the end we were all happy about it. 

So, since we didn’t eat enough…right, we had plenty of food (we had watermelon, peanuts, and attaya at Codou’s house about and hour before we ate dinner and then our fonde), we went across the street to a boutique and bought cookies around 10:30pm. Actually, we were all just craving something sweet, but that is not why I am writing this in my blog. To preface what Daniel and Anna thought was hilarious, I really wanted candy and had no idea what JUMBO spice was. In Senegal, there is apparently a spice seasoning packet or bourbon-like cube spice that is called JUMBO; Daniel and Anna have said that they see the commercial for it like six times when they watch TV in Dakar…I have never seen it. So, we are at the boutique and I inquiringly have the following conversation, as Daniel and Anna stand, laughing their brains out: 

Alex:  Qu’est-ce que c’est ça?

Boutique Owner: C’est le JUMBO.

Alex: Oui, mais quelle TYPE de bonbon?

Boutique Owner: C’est le JUMBO.

Daniel and Anna: Alex that’s the spice that we have been talking about for the past week.

Alex: Oh. (to the boutique owner) Merci, je ne le veux pas…juste des biscuits s’il vous plait.

Well, that’s it for this entry. These “souvenirs” might just be hilarious to me, but I need a place to put them and thought that you all might enjoy reading them.

ALEX

p.s. sorry if you don’t know French…you shouldn’t have taken Spanish, Russian, German

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