The events leading up to the Great Sleep

This is from an e-mail I sent my dad just without all the personal stuff.

Dakar has a smell to it. It's the same smell that Mexico has, and that the Mission District in San Francisco has. It reminds me of home, but in a way that doesn't make me homesick.

So we board the plane in D.C. and we are sitting there all ready with our seat backs and tray table in the upright position, and all our baggage and things have been stowed, when the captain comes on and says something about de-icing the plane and that it takes two mixtures blah blah blah and we sit... and then this truck comes with a cherry picker on it and from the top of the cherry picker there is the huge stream of liquid just power washing the snow and ice off of the plane. I watch it for awhile and then I fall asleep fully expecting to wake up in the air or on the way to it. No such luck! I wake up to a hot dry cabin full of babies crying and some thoroughly annoyed people. The captain comes on again and tells everyone to chill out we are in the largest plane on earth and it's going to take awhile to get all the ice off. He also tells us that they are going for the second mixture and that hopefully that won't take too long. So we sit some more... Eventually we get off the ground, but in the process of doing so you can watch the plane itself take off from a camera that is on the tail of the plane. Now as the plane is leaving the ground or returning to it they turn the camera off, but before during and after the flight you can have a birds eye view of your plane.

So I get to Dakar airport and it not a U.S. airport by any stretch pf the imagination. There are no jetways, though there are shuttle to take you from your plane to the airport. The airport consists of an entry point where you either go through customs or straight to baggage claim. When you go through customs you of course have to fill out the card that tells the essentials of your life story. Within this process that no one ever expects, so no one has a pen, unless you are neurotic like me and have three, I meet the SIT Senegal group. They are nice and looked just as clueless as I did!!! Anyway I get there and it is CRAZY!!! I have no way of explaining to you with out using my hands so that will just have to wait. But a nice porteur (porter) helped me get my bag and get all my stuff through security. This is where it gets sketchy. I told him I need to get to the Novotel shuttle and he says okay. So we get to the exit and he walks up to a woman in regular clothing standing next to a sign that says 'Novotel' We confirm again that that is where I am going and that that is where she is taking me, Then she takes me to go sit in some random chairs by another set of doors and tells me to wait here because she is picking up someone else. Now these chairs are plastic porch chairs, and look so dirty!!! But I sit in them because I figure that if it was a scam that I wouldn't be sitting in these chairs in front of security guards. So I sit there and wait for her to meet the other guy. So eventually this guy comes though he is not the guy that she was looking for, she doesn't realize it until we get to the shuttle and then
 we spend time trying to figure out where the hell he is going. What is vool about this guy though is that he works for the U. S. State Dept. and is in Senegal to do a short broad study of human migration and climate change! We chatted about what each one of us is here for and that was nice.

So I get to the hotel check in write my Dad an e-mail telling him the above and that I forgot my dictionary and plugs.  After that I take a shower and after that I get back on the computer to Skype with my Dad.  After that I try to decide if I want food or sleep more, so I decide to order food so that I can have the energy for a thorough sleep.  So I order Thiébou diene á la sénégalaise (fish and rice Senegalese style), and for dessert I ordered Crème au caramel (Flan or Caramel custard dessert).  After I have ordered I sit down on the bed and fall asleep. Literally just fell asleep.  I wake up thirty minutes later wondering where my food is and then I here a knock at the door! SO this food was AMAZING!!!! Though they don't de-bone the fish so you have to be careful. It was so good, I had to stop myself from eating too much, and the dessert was good old flan! It was nice to have something familiar for my favorite part of the meal!

Then after I put the tray in the hall to be picked up I lay on the bed thinking that I will wake up in like two hours... Around five o'clock I wake up go to the bathroom and fall back asleep... then at like seven I wake up and get under the sheets... then around twelve I wake up go to the bathroom read for two hours then go back to sleep... then at like six in the morning I turn off my alarm and decide to go back to sleep, then at seven thirty I decide to get up and go eat breakfast. I take the elevator down and walk into the restaurant.  I find a small table for two and put my book down to go get a plate.
Breakfast was a buffet...
It had four different meats two pork and two non-pork.  It had potatoes, mushrooms, tomatoes and what I think were eggs... They were really runny and I guess scrambled... with cheese? I don't know but they were not the eggs that I was hoping for.  The bacon was super thick and that was all very strange... but the tea was plain Twinning English Breakfast Tea!!! That made my day so I got a brave plate of all these strange forms of my favorite breakfast foods, and tried a little bit of each.  I go back to my table to find a man sitting at the table I had put my book down on!! I go and get my book and he looks at me and I say "C'est ma livre" and he kind of nods and I wander off in search of another small table. I didn't really like any of the food I had gotten, so I went back for a plate of bread, cheese, yogurt and orange juice.  I ate most of that, and I got full pretty quickly.  So I signed my bill and came back to the room! 

What is kind of neat is that when you walk by the staff of the hotel they say "bonjour madam" to you! It is super cool!!  Anyway I need to get some reading done, before I get back on-line!

~Thaddeus