Saint-Louis!

So! It's been a long time! We've been in Saint-Louis for about a week now, and are getting a hang of all the good restaurants around town, and where the best stuff is! It's been fun. It's kind of a funny little town, not a lot of lights, and divided into the part south of the bridge, and the part north of the bridge. The hotel is south; la ville is north. But it's okay, it's not that big anyways! We've been spending a lot of time in class with lots of guest professors coming, learning a ton about the culture, reading our books, going to the village, and exploring la ville. Voila what I've been up to:

We all went today to get dresses and boubous (man-dresses?) made for us. I'll post pictures when they're done! Spencer (bottom left) is holding up the fabric I chose for mine

Chloe and I in the museum here in Saint-Louis. We are getting used to all the guided tours, I think. This was before I knew it wasn't allowed to take pictures...On the wall in the museum:

Everyone in front of the museum:

A bounce house in the middle of this park? Yep.

This lady in the village with her henna-ish tattoos. They were trying to get us to get them also, so I might come home looking like this:

Emily with her Uke, Grace, Madame Thompson, Kylee and I went over to the village when everyone else went back to the hotel and got to see this women's meeting in the village, which was cool. And then we sang for them, I am a child of God, as always :)

They had received all this rice from the minister of women and were figuring out how to divy it up.

Saint-Louis. I am obsessed with the architecture and the colors here; it's amazing. One thing that's sad though is that all the buildings are pretty much falling apart. The city was founded in 1659, but no one really knows who owns what building now, so no one is willing to pay to renovate them, so the whole town is really just falling apart, sad.

Chelsey and I in front of our hotel, which is right on the river (aka... lots of moustiques!)

We took a little tour of the city, and crossed over the river to "le village des pecheurs" (the fisherman's village) to take a look around. It reminded me a little bit of Kibera. 25,000 people in a 1K by 300 meters of land. We got off the bus and were surrounded by children. I made the mistake of trying to give them some pens-- I quickly realized my error when they started attacking me to get to the pens, literally. Luckily our tour guide and this other guy pulled the kids off of me before any damage was done. Let's just say, I'm a little bit afraid of children. But here are some pictures. My roommate thought it was so funny how fascinated I was by the power lines, but I've never seen anything like it!

Drying the fish

Fish heads. Yum.

Madame Thompson's friend from the village. We went to this little village, where they had the children do all these cute traditional dances and even had us dance with them. So cute!

BUT, it was Prof. Lee who won the prize for the best dancer, hands down... except for making one of the little girls cry. Haha. It was hysterical.

Stay tuned! We're going to the beach tomorrow!