I recently went to Senegal for a friend’s wedding and birthday and had such a blast I needed to write it down somewhere! It was just the most wild trip I’ve experienced in a long time. I hadn’t traveled much since COVID. I spent a little bit of time in Amsterdam a few months ago, but that was with a friend and more laid back. This was my first really big adventurous trip in awhile.
I thought Senegal would remind me of South Africa, and it did. I took flights that had a layover in Barcelona for both going and coming back, which was nice because I booked really nice hostels and got some work done, ate paella, drank sangria, and the long trip was broken up. Once in Senegal, the driver she sent picked me up at the airport and drove me to a house in Dakar that my friend D was at for a pre-wedding dinner. Google Maps isn’t yet quite established there, and some of the neighborhoods haven’t yet developed to the point of having street names or signs. Because of this, everybody sends each other their locations via dropped pins, which provides an exact coordination of the person’s location. Everyone has phones there, even in the most remote areas, it’s kind of crazy to think about. Still, the driver was having a hard time finding the house. He kept getting out, maybe two or three times, to ask people who were walking in the street where this certain house was. I ended up directing him to it, but only after I convinced him that I could navigate us to the pin dropped. When I finally got there, I was so happy to see a person that I knew. Any person that I knew. It was D’s sister who came out to greet me and bring me into E’s house, a French friend of D’s who lived in Dakar. I’ve always liked her younger sister. I came not knowing anybody, because the other friend who was supposed to come with me backed out last minute. Luckily I make friends fast, so didn’t feel too, too solo the whole time there.
The dinner was lovely, after which we went to another friend’s house. This friend (A), had a palm tree growing right in the middle of her house, in a central courtyard, with skylights for the roof. It was such a beautiful three or four story house. This was actually A’s boyfriend’s home, which also doubled as a showroom for bathtubs that he sells. So the first floor had all these really cool bathroom setups to showcase the fancy tubs and sinks. Really sleek, modern designs, with cool furniture to match. It was an experience to get drunk and stay there overnight. I met her American friends from college, and the one I got along with the most is actually moving to Boston this summer! It’ll be nice to have a new friend in town. I also met a couple of her African friends, A and Y, from Gabon.
There’s construction going on everywhere, buildings going up constantly. Just like the way New York City has construction everywhere. People are building houses, and A’s house was even being worked on. The next day we were supposed to go to D’s home in Somone, so she had a van pick us up. As we’re leaving A’s house, I didn’t pay close attention to the people who were working on her doorway entrance, and I accidentally stepped on top of a short clay barrier between the front entrance area and the rest of the street without realizing that it was still wet and had just been shaped. So my foot went straight down through the short molded wall, ruining this builder’s work. He was pretty upset, and I didn’t speak French, so I was doubly mortified. I said sorry a million times, even though he didn’t understand my English. I think he got the gist of what I was saying, though.
The driver brought us to Somone, a little seaside village about an hour outside of Dakar, and close to a larger town called Sally. It was only later on that I learned where all these places were relative to each other. At the time I was completely oblivious to where I was or where I was going. I was pretty much just like, “I don’t know where I am, but that’s cool, I’m just here along for the ride, and to see new things.” As we got farther outside of Dakar, the landscape became more rural looking. Once off the highways, it was mostly dirt roads and Baobab trees.
It was beautiful, though. We went to have lunch at a restaurant there by the ocean. There were ocean views and an outdoor terrace where a big group of us sat. I met D’s husband (G) here (they already technically got married, this was just their celebration) for the first time, and some of G’s French friends. The restaurant had those mass produced white plastic chairs, and a few tables pushed together to accommodate the dozen or so of us. There were two stray kitties and a big German Shepherd roaming around. A few days before this trip, I had to get a yellow fever vaccine, which turned out to be something like $600. I also had to get a second polio vaccine because Senegal was apparently experiencing an outbreak of it at the time. But I’m good for life now, so it’s okay. The one vaccine I did turn down though, was the rabies shots, 1 because it was too close to my date of departure anyway since I totally forgot that travel vaccines were a thing, and 2 they cost about $400 each, which I was not about to pay for after shelling out $600 for the other two. My roommate made me promise not to touch any animals because she knows that I will try to touch any dog, cat, or bird, even if it’s wild. I try to touch everything. I broke her rule probably by the second day because I pet and fed the kitties. I did really want to touch the dog too, but I contained myself. The kitties were were so skinny. There were a lot of skinny animals that I saw there, which was sad.
I tried pigeon for the first time in my life at the restaurant. I wasn’t really a fan, but I was told that if it’s cooked correctly, it tastes excellent. After lunch we went to D’s home in Somone. If you’re wealthier in Senegal, you live in these compound-like places, which consists of the main house and a giant ten-foot high wall around the entire property. Her’s contained a swimming pool, separate living quarters for a full time groundskeeper, and the house was two floors with six bedrooms. We stayed there for several days, during which most of the bride and groom’s friends started arriving.
The full friend group consisted of D and G’s close friends. G went to undergrad in Paris, so there were “The French,” a group of about a dozen white, very traditional, upper-middle class French people, many of them couples. I’m totally playing into the stereotype here, but the French were awful. There were two that I liked, T and C, but otherwise, they liked to talk amongst themselves and didn’t mingle much with the Americans. “The Americans” consisted of me, her best friend from grad school (Am) & her boyfriend (M), and her college best friends (V, Al, An) and their partners (D, S). The girls from college all spoke Spanish, so they would talk amongst themselves. Their partners didn’t, so I bonded with one of the guys, but the other man didn’t talk much and worked a lot, so I didn’t really get to know him very well, unfortunately. There were also “The Africans,” who were made up of all her friends she grew up with in Senegal, and were now spread out all over Africa and Europe. I think I got along the best with the Africans out of all these little cliques that formed. I found some sort of belonging with Am&M, but unfortunately they only stayed til the wedding ceremony and then left, so I was more on my own for the second half of the trip.
We went out to a bunch of different places in and around Somone and Sally, the drinks and food were like Boston prices. I was spending around $40-50 a meal, wondering why it was so pricey. Then I realized about halfway through the trip that it was because they were taking us to the fanciest of the fancy restaurants. What would be five star restaurants here in America. D still told us not to touch the salads or any raw vegetables and to dump out the ice from any cocktails. I stopped ordering cocktails after the first week and stuck to wine and beer because I kept forgetting to dump out my ice. And they definitely wouldn’t let me eat any of the food from the street vendors, as much as I wanted to try it. We spent several days at her place, having parties, checking out very nice restaurants and bars by the beach or ocean, or just hanging out by the pool. It reminded me of how much I really enjoyed going out with my friends in South Africa, when we would go to Hoedspruit and other towns far out from Joburg and just marvel at the differences between the US and there, soaking all the foreign-ness up.
D had already had a traditional Muslim wedding the year before. The civil ceremony was just to sign a bunch of papers and make it government official. The ceremony was at her house and all in French, but I sat next to one of D’s childhood friends who translated for me. There was one point when the official asked G if he chose to be monogamous or polygamous, because it’s still legal in Senegal to take several wives. He turned around to his friends and jokingly asked, “which should I pick?” which was hilarious because D is definitely monogamous, I think most people there now are too. Her friend and I bonded over humorously wondering when women would get the opportunity to marry multiple husbands.
The next day, we drove several hours down south for three days of her Western-style, white dress wedding ceremony – Which I will write about in part 2 on another day because this trip was just so huge it’s going to end up like a trilogy!