Today was the end of our time in Dakar, so we spent the morning and part of the afternoon heading north to St. Louis, the French capital of Senegal. The bus ride was long, but broken up with odd and interesting encounters. At our first pit stop, we met a bus with loudspeakers, broadcasting the chanting of the Qur'an, along with another bus of identically-dressed women whose idea of queueing up for the bathroom was definitely African. We drove through St. Louis to a spit of land bounded on one side by the Atlantic and on the other by the mouth of the river. Here, in a complex rife with colonial overtones, stands La Saint-Louisienne Langue de Barbarie, our home for two nights. It's a long bus ride out from the city, right through the docks where the fresh fish are unloaded at all hours of the day. It was colorful and exotic, but not so aggressive a place as Dakar.
After lunch at the hotel, we headed to the University of St. Louis for a meeting with members of the faculty. This pleasant conference, on a relatively new campus, was heartening. Then it was back into the city for a tour in horse-drawn carriages.
After dinner, some of us caught a set or two at the St. Louis International Jazz Festival, which serendipitous scheduling allows us to dip into once or twice.
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