enjoying the local cuisine

 

Not a particularly well-composed photo, as it was only supposed to be a record shot for my own memories, not something to share.  But then I thought about how good some of the Senegalese dishes are, and how important hospitality is in this country, and decided that I needed to share it as there is no way I can do this dish justice in any attempt to describe it.

For a start, the dish - thieboudienne as it's called locally - is usually translated for foreigners as "rice and fish".  Yes, the basis of the dish is broken rice, and it contains fish (typically grouper or snapper), but it also has a great variety of vegetables (in the case above, it has carrots, cabbage, sweet potato, yams, bitter tomato and aubergine), often other seafood (eg the prawns and crabs above), plenty of onions, tomato and tomato paste, local ingredients such as yet (some kind of mollusc, typically fermented in sand) and nététou (fermented locust beans) and other seasonings.  The lady who made the one above told me that it took her around three hours.

It's eaten out of the platter it is served in - either with the fingers or with a spoon - each person digging in to the rice nearest to them but with those close to a bigger ingredient typically cutting chunks off and delivering them to other diners - and the host(ess) sharing out the fish.  Typically any foreign guest will find huge piles of everything placed in front of them!  It's commonly agreed to be the national dish, but there are plenty of other local dishes such as chicken or fish yassa (in a sauce of onions, lemon juice and dijon mustard), and mafe (a kind of peanut sauce).  All three are delicious.

What you might notice from the picture above is evidence of alcohol consumption!  In fact, of the group I ate this with, the only person I noticed not drinking was the African-American amongst us.  Certainly in Dakar, all of the supermarkets have a well-stocked alcohol section, with wines, beers, liqueurs and spirits held in much greater quantities than required to supply the 5% of the population who are Christian.  In fact the Muslim leaders here do not talk about alcohol and the population happily drink - although I've not seen evidence of excessive drinking.

I have to admit though that this platter above was a rare special treat for me, and there is no way I am going to make the effort and take the time required to prepare any of the local dishes for my own consumption when I can rustle up some pasta in a tomato and onion sauce in fifteen minutes!

marking time

 

As the COVID cases continue to rise, with an increasing proportion coming from community transmissions rather than through follow-up of contacts of known cases, the government has started shutting us back down again.  My walk to the swimming pool this morning was in vain, as it turns out that gyms, pools and beaches were all shut down by a government proclamation this weekend - likely to be for a three-month period 😭.

Bars and nightclubs have also been closed again.  I suppose I should be grateful that I went to a bar - my first time during 2020, I think - on Friday evening for an expat social do, and managed to strike up potential friendships (numbers exchanged) with a couple of people there.  Just in time, before it became pretty much impossible to go out and meet new people once again.  Also yesterday I visited someone I met at one of the same expat events a year or so ago, following increasing interaction on facebook, and got on well with his wife plus exchanged contact info with another guest.  So perhaps my social life will pick up even as the opportunities to go out diminish once more.

It's sad that it has come to this, as the government were dealing with this rather well, but they gave in to the various pressures to relax various parts of the restrictions they had put in place, with the inevitable results.  I don't know anyone here who has been infected, so the pandemic itself still all seems rather distant, but seeing what is going on elsewhere in the world we know we cannot be immune, and with the low level of testing here you have to ask what is the true extent of the problem.  The age profile of the country helps us, as does the hot, humid rainy season that we are now well into, but I can only see things getting worse.

So apart from my two outings this weekend, and my now curtailed weekly swim, I have continued to do nothing here but work, look out of the window at the sky (the photo above being one of many I have taken over this period), and enjoy mango season, now sadly coming to an end.

I know I mentioned in my last post that my department would be sharing news in early August of job cuts, but as yet they have not done so although the cuts will still go ahead.  It's unsettling - for me more than my colleagues as I am the only one in my department for whom losing my job would also mean losing my current home.  I guess it is on my side that my employer has decided to extend our organisational international travel ban until 31 December (out of concern over the safety of flying allied with an expressed duty of care to staff) as I would have a good argument that they could not fly me home before that date even had they wanted to end my contract in, say, October.  But I try to push the thoughts from my mind, as the world is so uncertain at the moment that I could not plan what to do next - where to go - even if I knew that I were to be amongst the victims.