March 23

Ok so we are corrently on a break between parts one and two of vacation, so I figured I'd give a brief update on the first half while I had some time/before I forgot.
Day 1: woke up at 5:30 AM to work out before catching a 7 AM sept-place taxi to St. Louis...and encountered the world's largest rat while doing so.  Any of you ever seent eh movie The Princess Bride?  You know teh ROUS (Rodents of Unusual Size)?  That's what I saw.
After a bit of panic, ended up meetign with Aimee and Jenn, my 2 travel companions, and we go to the Gare Routiere, teh "station" to catch our taxi.  Now I put the word station in quotation marks because it literally looked like a junkyard more than anythign else; run-down, beaten-up station wagons were just strewn about haphazardly, with no discernable order system.  Sketchy guys walk up to yuo, ask you where you're goign, and then point you to the (hopefully) correct car and driver.  And then you wait in the car until it's full (7 passangers and a driver) and then you go.  Simple enough.
UNLESS, of course, after 10 minutes into your drive, your driver realizes that two of the nuts on your left rear wheel are missing...in which case, you pull over, he spends an hour fruitlessly trying to jam various pieces of metal into the wheel to fix it, and then afterwards you bump back to the gare routiere going roughly 10 km/hr to start the whole process over again.
Take two!
Fortunately, this was a huge upgrade, because after they unloaded and reloaded us into a new car, it turned out this one had head rests for the 4 hour drive.  So things work out.
Anyways, after arriving in St. Louis, we took a cab to our youth hostel...but, rather than pick us up and drop us off at our destination, our particular cab did 3 or 4 stops, picking up and dropping off the driver's buddies that he encountered on the road as he pleased.  Weird, but super friendly I suppose.
We get to our youth hostel, which is super nice and clean (and about 10 USD a night) and we literally never even gave our names or any sort of identification to check in...we just walked in, were handed a key, and told to have a pleasant stay.  Because that is the equivalent of a Senegalese security system.  And it's a pretty uneventful day until we meet our new hostel friend: her name is Karina, and she's an Ivoirian who currently lives in Canada and just graduated from Boston University, spending 8 months in West Africa on a fellowship doing microfinancing research.  She's great because 1) she's super friendly and awesome, and 2) she's African and proceeded to get us African prices on everything for the next 2 days.  Score for us!
Day 2:  We wake up early and meet a Mauritanian shop owner who invites us to Ataaya...more on that later.  We go to the Guembeul wildlife reserve, where we see monkeys, gazelles, tortoises, and  an umber of other African animals (so now we feel legitimized in coming here).  Then we realize that there is no transportation to get home so...we stand on the side of the road waiting for a taxi to pass us.
Mom and Dad you might want to skip this next part.
And then we accidentally hitchhiked!
A man in a regular car pullqs up...we assumed he was a clando taxi.  We greet him and ask how much to go to St. Louis and he says "C'est gratuit!  Montez!" ("It's free!  Get in!")  So we all climb aboard and after about 5 minutes of drivign and chatting (his son is at Cheikh Anta Diop University as well, blah blah blah) I have the sudden epiphany that...we are currently hitchhiking.  But the thing is, it really didn't feel like it-people just have a different idea of hospitality (and safety, I suppose) here...which was further proved when, halfway through our ride, we pull over to pick up an old lady walking in the heat with a cane as well.  It was one of those moments where I felt liek I never want to go back to American social interactions.
Anyways, we make it back to St. Louis safely just in time for Ataaya with our new Mauritanian friend...during which we watch Al Jazeera and discuss the North African political situation with the vendor and his young son.  It was surreal to say the least.
The rest of the day passed pretty uneventfully...until dinnertime, because as we were walking home, we realize we are being followed by a fou (crazy person), who drops his pants and picks up his pace to catch up to us.  So Karina whips out her pepper spray and we sprint home, luckily not having to use it, locking ourselves safely in our hostel.
Day 3:Nothing too exciting, excpet that we received another attaya invitation, this time from a Senegalese man in the town.  We accept, and turns out he serves ataaya to just about every person in the community: there's a crowd of about 10 of us seated on the sidewalk outside of his store front, and the women are all trying to teach us Wolof and chat with us-it was really nice.  Until a drunk/fou comes up and starts babbling/proposing marriage to me, ignoring my pelase of "Bayyil lii nga def" (stop what you're doing), at which point Fatou, the eldest, most authoritative looking woman of the group gets up and dumps a cup of hot tea of the man and chases him away.  And then she made us start a dance circle, and decided to rename us all...based on thze size of our hips.  Awkward and reaaaally uncomfortable for us toubabs, but apparently that's a normal thing to do here.  So Jenn is now Fonde, I am now Lax, and Amy, being the skinny one, is laalo.  In case any of you are plannign on travelling to senegal: don't unless you are fine discussing very personal things, such as diarrhea and your weight, with complete strangers.
Anyways, byt the end of our 2 hour ataaya session, Lamine, one of the men, invited us to see his welding studio the next morning.  Which we obviously decided to do, because, what the hell, we'd already been hitchhiking,why not just do every dangerous thing offered to us?
Day 4:  We stop at Lamine's workshop and he teaches us how to weld.  It's called soudure in French...and it's really an art form.  They have such limited, run-down equipment, and yet are able to make absolutely stuinning pieces...us girls?  Less so able.  It was terrifying.  And hot.  But we did it, and it was a fun way to close out the St. Louis portion of our trip.
Alright so I'm off...we leave for Saly in a bit, which will be a much less exciting, more lounging on the beach type of vacation.  I just wanted to check in and let you all know that I am sill alive...and I will be in touch when I am back again in Dakar.  Ba beneen yoon.