The sixty cent shave, part 3

Coming over the hill, getting the first glimpse of Toubab Diallo caught me off guard. Maybe it's the nostalgia more than what I actually felt, or it could have been the fatigue, but I remember just being struck by the sight of all these hills, the cliffs, the ocean and the houses that were perched on the edge of this, the city rolling over the landscape like some giant wave. It felt like I'd crossed some border, like I'd found a part of Senegal that was unknown, hidden. I guess Toubab Diallo is kind of like this, it's no Sally (the real tourist area, with giant five star hotels and all). I think the LonelyPlanet guidebook describes Toubab Diallo as a quaint place, like Sally but still unnoticed by the majority of tourists. That would make sense, despite all the white people, all the Europeans that did live there, they weren't ridiculous, at least not on the outside, they were all holed up in their houses, behind their high courtyard walls.

There were hotels, lots of hotels, in fact beautiful ridiculous hotels with a Senegalese staff that didn't expect you to say hello to them, they didn't expect you to acknowledge their existence, they just sat and figured you were European, that you didn't care about them or their experience. They didn't automatically say hello. I shouldn't complain, after all, this is what we were looking for, a little escape from this ever present conversation, a little silence as oppossed to being expected to carry on a conversation well past your interest.

The hotels. My god the hotel we stayed in was beautiful, this sea shell ridden, Disney Land like structure. Grass roofs. Wild flowers planted everywhere. Everything looked rustic, like it had been there forever, as if the rocks just formed in these ways. When we got here we thought this must have been a mistake. The guide book said we could find rooms for 4,000 CFA a night (8 dollars), but this place is exotic, wild, closed and cloistered. We thought for sure something had happened, the hotel had upgraded, they were now hosting only the elite Europeans, the business men that come to Senegal for a little relaxing, sit on the terrace and read a book, drink a cup of coffee and watch the tide role in and out. Despite this, we got a room, a beautiful masoleum like room, that you had to step down into, and it only cost us 5,000 a night (10 dollars). It was the dorm room, they would rent out beds as opposed to the room.

This room was like a tomb, like some exoctic burial site, especially my bed which looked just like a rocky ledge with a matress on it. You can see the ocean from the window. These things seem to good, their must be some catch, maybe we have to buy dinner, or maybe they'll come in a steal everything we own during the night.

Yet, they didn't, nothing happened, the only thing we would have had to deal with was the minor inconvience of having a fourth person stay in the extra bed that was in the room, but when we asked if the lady at the front desk wanted the key, she told us she wouldn't book anyone in the extra bed.

So we had a room. The beach was right outside our window. That is how the story starts.

We hit the beach soon enough. First to get something to eat and then later to swim. The ocean water was like any ocean water but to the backdrop of these cliffs, to all the ritzy European summer homes it didn't feel like Senegal. I guess the inebriation of it all stopped us from criticing it. It had a way of not upsetting us, despite all the weird things about it, the gitchy hotels, the Senegalese people that told us outright that they depended on tourists for EVERYTHING. This culture of expectations. Europeans need to come. Europeans need to spend their money, buy a house here, employ people, buy food at the super market, give to beggars, build hotels, create revenue, consume, eat, feed. These things only appear in retrospect, all these criticisms that live just next to the memories.

We didn't do much but relax, take in the sun, walk down the beach and sit on the terrace at night at feel the strong ocean wind blow over us. Every so often people would pop into this imaginative little world, like the Senegalese man who popped his head over the veranda and asked us if we wanted fish, a fire, anything? The senegalese women who sold jewerly just outside the front gate of the hotel, always asking us to just look, and then asking us what we will buy. These things litter the memories of the scenery, the beaches, the clear nights, and the quite days sitting on a hammock doing nothing but thinking. This was what we needed, time to think, time to do nothing, be expected to do nothing, and just think. Not think about something specific, not brood about our jobs, not plan out our next step in our research, just time to let our mind wander, contemplate nothing and come back to the world through this.

We ended up meeting some other students there, just by chance, they were out for a weekend, just visiting a beach town. We hung out, hit the beach together, took naps. Did things unextraordinary, even if it was in an extraordinary place, at least on the outside, at least the first time you come over the hill and the city seems like some Greek scenery, like some Mediterranian village, with the red clay bricks on every roof and the roads that never run straight. We climbed hills to go to stores (we asked for directions to a supermarket, well any place we could buy beer, and the man on the street told us to "climb the mountain", which when we did climb the hill, which he refered to as the mountain, magically we found a suprette, a toubab market that sold beer). The hardest part was leaving, not because I didn't want to leave, I mean I didn't want to leave, I didn't want to have to start doing work, to think about my research, but it was because we were caught in the two faces of this place. We couldn't find a cab that wouldn't charge us 5 times the normal price. We ended up paying, I guess overall it works out, the cab only cost 30 dollars and there were seven of us and it was an hour and a half car ride.

That is the end of the story that was inspired by the sixty cent shave. My beard and mustache are coming in again, a fact that the small bearded Senegalese man that shaved my beard, commented on when I walked by his booth the other day. "You beard is coming back, are you sure you don't want another shave?" I feel like ending this post with something sentimental and sappy like, "Not until I have some more memories to sift through."

Instead I will end it with a word, some random phrase, like Pickle.

Just like Richard Brautigan, ending his book with Mayonaise, just because he had never read a book ending in that way. Except I don't want to forget, and let myself end talking about something else, finding something more important to say, and let everyone down when I don't say the word pickle.