From Sunny Senegal to Gray Britain

October 16, 2008

Over the summer, I took a trip to see friends in the UK, and my hostess did me the great honor of wanting to throw me a party in her lovingly planted and very spacious garden.

In typical British style, prep time was spent putting caviar decoratively on blintzes and raspberries on beds of whipped cream whilst looking fearfully out of the window to see if the weather would hold or whether we would have to move all the lawn chairs back into the garage. (Ultimately you will be glad to learn that the weather did hold and that we were able to swill champagne on the lawn just as my hostess had envisioned).

To prepare for the party, I set myself the task of picking up the windfall from my friend’s apple trees – it had been quite some time since I had last seen an apple tree, you see, so I quite enjoyed the task. My local fruits here are mangoes and limes, not apples. (Or rhubarb, which my friend and I feasted on fresh from her garden).

And in fact once when I was teaching I wanted to use an apple tree as an example but quickly had to switch to something more tropical to make my point. This happens more often than I would care to admit – a careless reference to the Bible rather than the Koran, or to food while others are fasting during Ramadan – it is extremely difficult always to keep the cultural differences in mind. But although the warmth of my welcome in the UK was unsurpassed, but I think that I will not opt to teach there if I can help it - the south definitely holds greater climactic appeal!

In fact, I was so cold the entire time I was in England that one
friend took pity on me and placed a hot water bottle in my bed each
night - I hugged it gratefully, reflecting on how hard I must be to
please, considering that now in the sweltering heat of an October in
Dakar I have retired to my apartment to sit immobile in front of my
fan at its highest speed. Thankfully, there are signs of the approach
of the little winter or ‘petit hiver’ which generally begins in
November – one of them is the unbelievable amount of algae that is
currently washing ashore each day.

While in the UK, I was treated to an outdoor performance of Richard
III. I had expected an August evening to be quite warm, even in
England, needless to say, but my friends and I huddled, hatted and
scarved against the cold, passing around a thermos of hot soup. On
that memorable day I also tried my first elderflower cordial and stole
pedigree mulberries from a historic inn called The George which, by
the way, had the most sumptuously decorated bathrooms I had seen in a
while (often African bathrooms are a hole in the ground, and are
seldom, as you will recall, equipped with toilet paper). In this
instance, I am including a picture of the Botticelli-inspired decor
for your viewing pleasure.

It was a lot warmer the day we toured Angelsey Abbey, a perfectly
hideous mansion in East Anglia distinguished only by the utter
tackiness of the bric a brac it houses. But clever marketing is
everything: on the Internet, the adjective you will find used to
describe its collection is ‘unique.’

Then again, in the literature, Dakar is also referred to as the Paris
of West Africa. ‘Nuff said…

About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a restless wanderer who earned an MA from the University of Freiburg and has worked in a youth hostel in the French Alps, a law firm in Montreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in university press publishing. At the moment her home base is Dakar, Senegal, where she is supposed to be teaching but is doing far more learning, as you will see by reading her blog at www.senegalschoolmarm.blogspot.com