Here we are: Africa! We've been to Morocco, and while that is technically Africa, it's Northern Africa, the Arabic zone, and it feels closer to the Middle East. Here we're in sub-Saharan Africa or what the French call "Afrique Noire" -- Black Africa. It's the first time for the girls and me, though Anthony lived in Nigeria for a few years straight out of university.
We spend our first couple days on Ile de Gorée, a tiny island just a short ferry ride away from Dakar. Given the proximity to the big city, I figure we will find all descriptions of it as charming vastly overrated. Imagine my surprise then when we find it delightful and charming as all get out. It turns out Obama was here just last year, and if it's good enough for the President, it's good enough for us.
The charm comes from the fact that it's a vehicle-free island -- you can easily stroll the whole thing in about an hour or two -- surrounded by pretty blue Atlantic waters and dotted with colorful, old, colonial buildings.
Of course, being an island, there are boats and beaches (and beach hair-dos), though it does seem too close to Dakar for the water to be clean enough for swimming.
Because this island sits off the westernmost hump of Africa, it makes geographic sense that it would have ties to the slave trade. What those ties are is slightly disputed, frankly, but no matter what its actual historic role, the island serves as a valuable symbolic reminder of the trade. A statue stands outside the museum, which supposedly (though this is partly what's in dispute) housed captured slaves till they boarded the ships to take them to the New World. The door at the bottom would have been the spot where they exited to get on the small ships that would take them to the big ships. It's quite sobering.
Sobering as the history is, the island itself is tremendously cheerful. And, in fact, we have a breakfast here where I have not only the best laugh of the trip but probably of the decade -- one of those rare laughs where you're doubled over, sides aching, crying, and unable to breathe. It's a long story, and mostly one of those you-had-to-be-there anecdotes, but essentially, we sit down in our B&B as the first table ready for breakfast of tea and breads. The tables that sit after us are all served plates heaped with a dozen pastries, while we only get two -- to be shared among the four of us. Then throughout the breakfast, the staff ask us for our knives, then spoons, then cups so they can wash them and give them to other tables. By the end of the meal, it passes from annoying to sublimely funny as I am actually mid-way through buttering a piece of bread when the knife is snatched from me, and can't even finish my cup of tea for laughing before that is snatched away, too. Meanwhile, the other guests are enjoying their pastries with multiple knives for butter and jam, with extra spoons to stir the tea in what used to be our mugs. I bet when Obama was here, he got to use his spoon. It may be a former French colony, and French may be the language we use here, but it's exactly the opposite of the long, lingering, unhurried café in Paris.
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