Yum!

Before our trip to real Senegal, we got to go to Little Senegal in Harlem. we walked around and saw some music CDs, DVDs, clothings, wood sculptures, spices and many other things.  The most memorable thing was the food. it was fish and hot sauce which was so good. Some people thought that the food would be weird like zebra tungue ;) but it wans't! it was incredibly good. I said bye-bye to my diet and enjoyed the food.

breakfast was usually french baguette with chocolate spread or butter with coffee or powdered milk. since not every household has refrigerator or even if they do, power goes out almost everynight, it doesn't make much sense to have dairy food around. so powdered milk was used instead. it tasted like baby food. My host family gave a a cup on the first morning. In my host family, everybody gets a cup and they have to wash it and take it to the room and bring it down every morning if they wanted to drink something.

typical breakfast: Baguette + chocolate spread +coffee/ powder milk

Throughout the trip, we got to have lots of fish, chicken, rice and bread. we hardly had any fresh veggie. and due to its relious belief (Islam), pork wasn't common. We had onion sauce the most which was poured over rice and eaten or just eaten with bread.

fish+ onion sauce + couscous

fish + onion sauce + white rice

fish + rice + very spicy sauce

Popular juices are bissap juisce, ginger juice and Buy(bouy) juice. Buy is the fruit of the boabab tree. Bissap juice smells flowery and fresh. it is sweet and somewhat like cranberry + pomegrante. Buy juice is thicker and milky. The one we had in Little Senegal was sweeter.

Buy juice

on the day 4, i started to crave hamburger. i also wanted some salty potato chips. This was somewhat alarming because i thought 'if i can't survive more than 4 days without junkfood, something must be wrong.' anyway, I went to the supermarket called "Casino" where all the French and American products were, and bought junkfood and ate them. for a while, Casino was my heavenly place where there is AC and junk food!. We also found a restaurant called "Ceasars" where we can get ice cream, pizza, fries, milkshakes.. you name it. we went there quite often too.  i didn't take picture of hamburger or potato chips thinking that it is not Senegalese experience, but now i regret it. Hamburger withdrawl symptoms showed me how addicting the junk foods are!
p.s : Senegalese hamburger wasn't as juicy as i hope and fried chicken was so bony there was no meat to eat.

"eat me!", the junk food said.