Last weekend (or weekend before last by now) our program took us on a trip to Sokone. It’s a big village/small town close to Koalack, near the center of the coast, just north of The Gambia. It was one of the most touristy thing I had done in a long time. We stayed in an auberge of little huts with concrete walls and straw roofs, and ate together under an open straw roof structure. The mosquitoes were awful, reminding me that the really wonderful thing about frosty Novembers is that absolutely all of the mosquitoes are dead. Our first day there, we ventured into the mangrove swamp, a trip for which they advised to bring plastic shoes, because we might get “a little muddy.” The swamp had a damp briny smell to it, but it didn’t line up with my idea of a swamp, which is probably based a little too literally on the Fire Swamp from The Princess Bride. The mangroves trees were bright shiny green and grew in clumps, with fresh-bread colored sand in patches between them, and crab scuttling in and out of their holes. The mud looked like sand until you stepped in it—and squelched all the way down until you were knee-deep. “A little muddy” turned out to mean that by the end I look like I was wearing big brown, slightly slimy cowboy boots. I will admit that I didn’t pay as much attention to the lecture of the mangroves as I could have; I was too entranced by the stillness of the mangrove swamp, the sound of the crabs underfoot and the birds overhead, and the feeling of mud squishing between my toes.

The next day, we went to a very different part of the mangrove swamp, where the spaces between the clumps of mangroves are not mud/sand, but water. We took a pirogue (a Senegalese fishing boat roughly the shape of a canoe, but larger) to a small village, and then walked about a mile to what for a lack of a better word I’ll call a resort. I am loath to call it that, because resort implies luxury, and this place was not for that kind of tourist, it was for the kind of tourist who doesn’t mind going for several days without showering, and doesn’t shriek at the sight of a cockroach in their bed. Like many places in rural Senegal, it was a collection of small buildings rather than one large one; several small huts for guests to sleep in and a larger area that served as a restaurant. I wasn’t sure what we were doing there until we arrived, a travel factor that I am getting more and more used to. When I did figure it out, I got excited; we were there to go kayaking in the mangroves. They had three person kayaks, with the people in front paddle, while the person in the middle gets to play at being royalty. Maneuvering the kayak was much more difficult than I had expected (we had to fire Shani as our front paddler, when it became clear that we might never leave the shore) but it was amazing. The other skill I’ve been cultivating is laughing when everything is going the opposite of how I want it to, and it was a useful skill to have in a on a windy day, trying desperately to go in a straight line which instead veering into the branches of the mangroves on either side. At one point we followed our guide into a place where the mangroves were closer together, so that they formed a sort of glade. The light the trickled through the mangrove branches was muted and slightly green, and the mangrove roots reached out of the water in graceful arches like Greek architecture, or a million Jewish wedding hupas. I felt like we were in a magical otherworldly haven, like the set of Mid Summer Night’s Dream, and I kept getting frustrated that pictures couldn’t capture how beautiful it was.

After we got back, I coerced my brother into teaching me to make attaaya. Attaaya is Senegalese tea, and aside from being delicious, it has enormous cultural importance. Many if not most Senegalese drink attaaya almost every day. It’s one of the only things that the men reliably do around the house, no matter what the political leanings or modernity of the family is like. I asked one of the brothers in the village about this, and he looked at me like I was stupid. “Well the women do the cooking and the cleaning and take care of the children, so it makes sense for the men to make the tea.” Clearly. Attaaya has a tradition of being three cups of tea (though most people don’t make more than two) and what with the book of that title that so popular lately about a completely different culture, it makes me wonder if three cups of tea isn’t some trans-cultural phenomenon. But it is hard to think of it that way, as attaaya feels very Senegalese. They use Chinese green tea to make it, which is interesting because it tastes absolutely nothing like green tea, and a little bit of mint and a LOT of sugar. It’s served in little glass cups, and the most important factor of the presentation is getting a good head of foam in each cup, which you do by pouring the tea back and forth between cups for as long as it takes. This means my brother Gallo pours the tea back and forth (there’s a great wolof term for it which I have of course forgotten) for about five minutes and gets great foam, where as when I try I spill tea everywhere, and can keep going forever without creating more than I thin scum of bubbles. My brother Amadou kept taunting me every time I started pouring, “Hey Robin, your phone is going off, hey Robin, there’s a mouse! Whoa! Robin!” My family said that my tea was wonderful, and then laughed at me because I didn’t give tea to the oldest people first, and kept forgetting who had already had some.

It’s amazing how much my emotions and reactions fluctuate here. One moment I’ll be walking to school in the blistering heat, or using a toilet with no seat or paper, or waiting on an internet connection that takes 5 minutes to load anything, and I will moan and pout and think longingly of sweaters and Charmin and hi speed. And just hours later I’ll be sitting joking with my family, or be squished into a car rapid with a friend on my way to the market, or walking home at night with a perfect breeze, staring at the stars, and think, “I love Senegal.”