What follows are the thoughts and experiences I've had over the past two-ish weeks:
- Last Friday was my last meeting with the students from the YES program. I was working intensively with a few kids who needed help with their English and we focused on lots of reading and listening exercises. It was cool to get to know them a little more personally over the past few weeks. It's possible that I'll see all of the students in the airport since they're flying out to the US on the same day that I return from home leave.
- I've begun experimenting with making my own pad thai. There's lots of Asian food to be found in the grocery stores here - key ingredients such as fish sauce, rice noodles, and tamarind aren't too tough to locate. I bought a cheap wok for around $10 from the Chinese supermarket located downtown. The first batch of pad thai I made almost killed my wife and I. We both lapsed into sodium-overdose comas about twenty minutes after we ate and I drank enough water to drown a fish once I woke up. The next batch was better, but I still have a ways to go before I'll go around telling people that I can whip up a mean pad thai.
- In other food-related news, a Vietnamese sandwich stand has opened up not too far from our house. For 500cfa (about $1), I can get a pretty tasty sandwich. It's made on French bread and has a little ground beef, a few cold cuts, some lettuce, tomato, and onion, and it's seasoned with ketchup, soy sauce, hot sauce, and a few other ingredients that I can't readily identify. For a buck, it's pretty filling and I have it at least once a week for lunch.
- On Saturday my wife and I went on a canoe trip down the Niger River with a few friends. It was nice to get out of the city and the heat wasn't too oppressive. One stretch of the river has some rapids which were fun to navigate our way through. Lots of locals said hi and waved as we passed by. Man, most everyone we meet in Mali is super nice. It's great.
- The dry season is winding down here - it seems like it rains at least every other day and the dirt roads are getting pretty rough. Hopefully by the time we get back from our home leave, we'll have missed out on the humidity of the dry-season-to-rainy-season transition.
Why is there so much asian food there? Seems like an unlikely spot for it.
ReplyDeleteHave fun in "Western" civilization!
Lots of Chinese here these days. From what I understand, the Chinese are investing all over Africa. Here they're building a badly-needed third bridge over the Niger river, which runs through the middle of town, and there's lots of signs around for various construction projects they're working on.
ReplyDeleteThey were very present in the DRC, too. They were looking for ways to extract natural resources, especially copper, from the country and in return helped to fix up the roads.
Hi Charlie, I ams ure you are very busy with the change and family. give us some feed back how are your days...
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