New Year, New Blog Address

After many years of somewhat reliable service, I've decided to move my blog over to Wordpress. It's just easier that way.

Check out the new blog !

The Yard Sales of State College

Moving to an unfurnished apartment, and the ensuing hunt for furniture, reminded me just why it was that I had always chosen to live in furnished apartments.

On the other hand, it has given me the change to rediscover a bit of creativity, which has been sorely missed. By that I mean I have gone exploring in my new corner of State College, and along the way I have discovered fun things I didn't know about.

One such cool thing is called CentrePeace, which teaches inmates life skills and they repair the furniture which is then sold. It is filled with all kinds of neat stuff, and I am now a HUGE fan. 

There was a random yard sale along the street I live on, so I stopped to check it out. 

While I was originally concerned about the reasons for which one might possess such an item, a friend pointed out that many soldiers in WWII would bring Nazi artifacts home as souvenirs. Phew. I'll take that explanation.

These are Edison music rolls. Apparently Edison spent time in central PA, which is a bit of trivia that is new to me.

From a lady at CentrePeace I found out about a big church community yard sale, which had such excellent record selections as the following:

I didn't buy those two though, I opted for an AWESOME album of The Supremes, and discovered lots of new favorite songs. Also a Dvorak and a few Gershwin albums. I also found an old, black trunk, a cookbook, and lots of pretty frames. 

Totally a success.

Unceremonious

I would just like to apologize for failing to conclude my trip with a deserving post. 

The day after I flew back to France is the day that the Air Algérie flight departing from Ouagadougou went missing (filled with Burkinabè and French people, among others).

Eventually we learned that it had crashed over Mali,

and frankly I think the shock of that made it too hard for me to think about my trip.

But I should point out that I made it back, it was wonderful, and I find that I miss it. 

People there warned me that once you go, you will always go back.

Alas, sitting around in a maquis in State College is hardly a worthy replacement (were I able to find such a place to begin with), and the start of a new semester makes my life seem a whole lot less 

action-packed.

Until the next adventure, at least ...

Chicken Sh*t

The title of this post, as you will discover, had both a literal and figurative role in my day yesterday.

But I'll come back to that.

First, Amadou took me out to visit his boss' farm, and we were given the tour. To get there, we followed a rough trail/road into [what felt like] the middle of nowhere.

Drove through some cattle, too ...

At first, I couldn't figure out why it looked so different. A cornfield, after all, is a cornfield. But then I realized that in most US cornfields, the mechanization of farming means trees are a nuisance. Here, they leave the trees in the middle of fields, because most of the work is done by hand anyway. [Disclaimer: I have constructed this logic based on the trees/no trees observation. I don't know anything about farming, so this could be all wrong.]

The farm was up kind of high -- here's looking out over some of the fields towards the hills in the distance.

They are growing lots of corn, some eggplants, tomatoes, lettuce, and piments (some kind of hot pepper, the dictionary says a chili). Here's a tiny chili plant:

Amadou even posed for a picture! The fabric he's wearing is called Basin, and it's very  fashionable and expensive. Designs are woven into it, and then it is dyed in all sorts of neat ways. It's also shiny, which is probably part of what makes it so expensive. I think it feels super uncomfortable, but Amadou assures me it isn't. (It's almost like that plastic-y paper that you sometimes see on labels and stuff -- I tried to tear a scrap to see if that's what it is. It isn't.)

Discovered this is the work of termites. I'm simultaneously impressed and horrified. Kind of looks like a sand castle? In a sense, it actually is.

The farm also has chickens. Lots of chickens. The chickens to eat were all white and in a separate pen (he said there were hardly any because most had been taken to market, but there were still a lot). These are the egg-laying chickens. SO MANY.

Here are a bunch of the eggs, to be taken off and sold:

This is where the post title comes in. The boss wanted to give me a gift : either a chicken, or eggs. My shock made me pause, while I considered my options ... I leave in two days and don't cook, but do I really want to have to carry back a dead chicken?

My hesitation was my downfall, because this was decided for me. Chicken it is. So the son went off to pick it out, and brought it back ... Feet tied, and STILL ALIVE. I don't know how well I covered up my mini-freak out (I'm no bleeding heart for animals, truth be told, but this is one step too close to the farm-to-table trend for me). So because I was too chicken shit to hold it (I mean, I held it for like 5 seconds while Amadou did something), Amadou had it like this while he drove.

The literal part of the chicken shit comes on our drive home. Because, you know, farms don't tend to be in the center of a city, we had a ways to go to get back into the usual part of Bobo. On the way, the chicken did its business ... Onto Amadou's hand. He seemed pretty unfazed and just moved the chicken out over the road as fast as he could and laughed. We were heading to a maquis for a "matinée dansante" (more in a second), and when we handed the moto over to be parked, he handed them the chicken. I thought this was because they were going to prepare it, but when we came out to leave several hours later, they handed it back to us. I guess they don't prepare chickens at this place. Amadou took it home with him, but he said today we'd give it to a restaurant to be prepared.

Anyway, on to the matinée dansante. It's basically a dance party in the bar that starts at like 4pm on Sunday, instead of late at night on Friday or Saturday. They played music from all over -- Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Sénégal, Congo, Burkina ... It was pretty fun. Everybody danced (including me, because why not).

Today is pretty much my last real day -- tomorrow I take an early bus to Ouaga, and then wait around several hours for my late night plane. I'll be back in Paris early Wednesday morning. I can hardly believe it has been a whole month!

American Cola

All the knock off sodas come from Mali. 

... But they're bottled under the authority of the Monarch Beverage Company (based in Atlanta, also tied to Coca Cola), so really I think it's more that we both produce the real brands, and the knock off version of the real brands. 

Caterpillars (and stuff)

Last night Amadou brought over the prepared caterpillars. You sauté them in oil, with onions (and I think he said tomatoes too). To be honest, they aren't half bad. The hardest part is the psychological struggle of knowing you're eating caterpillars.

On a more typical note, I discovered Youki (which is the Brakina beverage company's soda brand; the WPop of Burkina). America, we need to have a talk. Burkina has "Moka Café" flavored soda. WHY DON'T WE HAVE COFFEE FLAVORED SODA?! It's awesome. We should get on that.

Amadou also brought over some of the baobob powder that is used to make the jus de pain de singe. It's seriously just a yellowish powder. I tried to dump it in water and make my own, which turns out to be not how that works. Amadou just laughed at me.

En grève

Ha. Haha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

The is the workers' union headquarters for the Hauts-Bassins region.