Life

As you may have gathered from the last post, life here is pretty different to back in the UK. One startling similarity is the bike shops though! The photo above is a bike shop we came across in a village outside the capital. Once you get inside it feels and smells just like a bike shop in the UK that hasn't been sorted/cleaned for a few years. The thing to do here is to pay a mechanic to pump up your tyres whenever you need air for your bike. As we are going off into rural areas we thought we would buy a pump. As everyone pays someone else to pump their tyres I'd thought a pump would be expensive. In fact it was only about 50p. I think it is more of a status thing. If you have to ride a bike here you are apparently telling the world you are not that successful. However, I guess if you are paying someone else to pump up your tyres you are also telling that to the world!

One thing we've found that is still very different is this whole thing of eating. There is a local dish called To (probably not spelt like that). It is just ground millet mixed into a paste and then somehow set into a weird white tasteless jelly. Tastlessness is one thing, but the texture is horrible. And they they tend to serve it with the weirdest tasting sauces! A local dish I do quite like however is Dege (also probably not spelt like that). It is again millet, I think, but mixed with sweet milk. It is quite good although the place we first tried it was special to say the least. Sana, our translator, took us to the canteen at the university where students can get government subsidised meals. The meals should be 600f but are reduced to 100f (about 15p). The surroundings are appropriate to the price. You first of all have to queue through a weird rusted metal structure that is a bit like a maze of the gates used to contain angry cattle at a market. Then, once you've survived this, you go through a very tight space (maybe a fat test to see if you deserve the food) into a room that was once painted white but is now mysteriously marked with red patches (feels a bit like a slaughterhouse). Once you've made it this far you emerge into an area where you are faced with a high metal wall with tray-sized holes. If you are lucky enough to stand at the right hole (and you have the magic piece of metal they will exchange for a tray) you get given a tray of food, but no cutlery. Once you have your food, you can then proceed into the eating area which feels just like a prison dining area only with many more flies and people holding plastic bags through the bars that are the walls asking for your leftover food.

Having said all that, it was good of Sana to show us student life in Ouagadougou and to respect our budget enough to take us there. I think the fact that we've said that we will pay him more at the end if we can means that he is keeping a tight hold on our purse strings!