well for starters, some new pictures are up...again

yesterday was an unexpectedly awesome day. It started slow and stayed slow for most of it. I took a walk around where i live to try and get my bearings. it is a confusing place, there are a lot of alleyways that take you in much more direct routes but only if you know where you are going


The following picture, which you can see more of on my webshots is of a typical field here in the gambia. The closest thing this country has in regards to trash disposal is burning.



the picture on the right is whats left over from burnings. This is all less then half a mile from where im living. After that we had a meeting with the registrar about proper etiquette while attending classes. Mostly common sense stuff except for the gender seperation. This country, and i guess a lot of the rest of the world has a gender segregation that none of us are used to. Contact between the sexes is limited but apparently in the unversity it is more open. who knows what that really means. I guess we will find out.
Afterwards, we had a musical group come to us and play, the music was awesome (even though it all sounded the same to me). The whole group were all members of the same family as well which made it awesome-er. everyone in the group was real enthusiastic and i made friends with the xylophone guy, he was twenty and told me i should come to another one of his
The last few songs, we all got up and danced around it, was fun cause they didnt care that we had no rhythm.


After our little concert, we had heard the Juniata college of pennsylvania had some students nearby so we managed to get in touch with them and invited them over. They have been here for six weeks, so it was real nice to talk to them and we could tell that they definetly missed american companionship outside of their own group. It was 5 girls and 1 guy, needless to say, we all feel bad for him. Well they took us to this little restaurant that was ridiculously cheap but so amazingly slammin. There are lots of these restaurants that people build on their properties. This one is apparently owned by a nice guy from holland. I got half a chicken with salad and chips for 75dalasi...a little more then two dollars. Beers were 20 dalasi each, around 75cents. It was so much fun to talk with these other americans. We made friends with a gambian who had worked in bethesda, MD for 6 years at a bagel shop and used to live in silverspring as well. He hung out with us all night as well. The tab ended up being 1000 dalasi...little less then 20bucks. All in all a good night.

This is one of our gambian friends
That video is hatabe, he is employed by the program to basically hang out with us. He's awesome

This is our drumming teacher, we are learning how to do this

a clip of the music group that came to our place