It's mid-October, let's hit up the beach?!

This past week was pretty normal by African standards. We went to another gallery opening in hopes of free food, but weren’t completely satisfied so we went to a restaurant. The artwork was great, though, an artist did some abstract interpretations of places and things around Senegal and painted on traditional African fabric. The restaurant, called Chez Louca that advertised African and European food. While it wasn’t quite what we were expecting they had a great spaghetti dish with a curry tomato sauce, peas, carrots, and tuna. It was delicious, I promise. We also went to a reggae club on Thursday night called Pen Art, a local hang out, with a few of our Senegalese friends. We had to leave early, i.e. 3am because a few people have internships on Fridays. I have discovered that despite my limited dance skills I can still dance to reggae music since it only requires moving back and forth.
Saturday we went out to Ile de N’Gor which is off the northern coast of the Dakar peninsula and rented a house for the night with some of our Senegalese friends from the night before. They aren’t in school yet so they wanted to celebrate their last few weeks of vacation with a house party Senegalese style. The next morning we went in search of breakfast and went to both beaches on the island before finding a restaurant with both egg and bread to make us egg sandwiches. Finding a restaurant with everything on the menu is quite a commodity here. We spent some time soaking up the sun on the beach since rumor on the street is that the middle of October gets cooler. Yesterday, when the temperature dropped to 85, I started to believe these rumors. When we returned to Dakar via pirogue and taxi we took a much-needed nap since we had plans to go out Saturday night as well. The party didn’t start until 1am and I’m not really sure when it ended, although it was long after 5:30am when the last of our friends left. We’re going to have to better prepare for such events in the future.
Yesterday, I interviewed with Aid Transparency for an internship. It’s an organization run by Habib Sy, the former Minister of the Interior and a lot of its work relates to government budget transparency in Africa. He has a conference for the next two weeks so I’m not starting until he gets back. Just like any Senegalese person, he isn’t all too anxious to get things going.
In other news, our family has scolded Cecilia and me for not being able to speak Wolof after two months of residing here and all utensils at meals have completely disappeared. The grace period is over.