Three day weekends are nice :)

This past weekend has been pretty good. On Friday I slept in (well, as much as I can in my noisy household) which was a nice change from getting up at 7.45 for my classes. I met up with a few friends and we grabbed a taxi to take us to an area of Dakar called Ngoor. Once there we hopped onto a pirogue (their fishing boats) and took a ride over to the little island of Ngoor. We spent the day there, swam a little bit (the water is getting warmer!) and just chilled out. As I keep saying, it's very nice to have somewhere to get away from everything and just chill out. I also just finished reading The Kite Runner, which has been reccommended to me by multiple people and I just got around to reading. It was an awesome book, something that always makes me very happy. We left Ngoor at around 5pm, even though the sun was still up, in order to get back home and shower off all of the salt!
Saturday morning I met up with my friend Hannah to go and get a cup of real coffee (not the insant Nescafe stuff) and some pastries. There's a place that isnt too far from me which has just that, and I've been to a few times. While we didn't get any fancy pastries (too early in the day for so much sugar!) we did each indulge in a doughnut and some coffee. Not exactly like home, but pretty close- they do know their pastries in French speaking countries!
I went home to have lunch (I feel like I don't spend enough time at home sometimes, but when I'm there I don't feel like I'm doing much, so I don't feel too guilty) and then got my stuff together to go on an excursion to the Dakar zoo! I was expecting it to be of pretty low standards, and I was right. The cages were incredibly small and in a few different spots it was actually possible for the animals to put a body part outside of the cage. If you look at my pictures you'll get what I'm saying ( http://american.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2046230&l=b609a&id=7402326 ). A very curious experience seeing those animals like that, but also crazy how up-close we got to get! I think that the animals were probably under-exercised and didn't have much energy to try to do anything if you got too close. Aside from the monkey's who do everything they can to get food out of you- which is strongly encouraged and leads me to believe that it's a large part of their diet.
I went with Hannah and her Senegalese language partner and a friend of his, so we spent the afternoon speaking in French and talking about a wide varitey of topics. It was the first time I've hung out with Senegalese, so it was nice to talk to someone and get a youth's perspective on things here (for example, one of the guys clearly was not a fan of polygamy, and judging by his 8 brothers and 3 sisters, he was in a polygamous family). We came back around 6pm, just when it was starting to get chilly, and I ate at home. Same old same old in that region.
I've started to feel a little bit under the weather and I think it's because I'm not drinking enough water. Around here you have to constantly be drinking water, but you also have to buy your water, something I often fail to do. So I made it a point to go and get a 5Liter jug of water to keep myself well hydrated, and I've spent my Sunday pretty much doing nothing in hopes of saving up some energy. I think it's working, but who knows.
Hope everyone is doing well!