New Senegalese

Last week, Sarah, Sara and I all had lunch at New Senegalese, so-called because it is the newer of the two Senegalese-run lunch places in Kankan. It is generally delicious, and probably the best place in town to get chicken with yassa onion sauce. They also serve what Guineans call riz gras, or oily rice, which is rice cooked with some spices and oil, fish, and some vegetables. (In Senegal the call it ceeb u jen "cheb-oo-jen", which is Wolof for "rice and fish.")

Riz gras, AKA oily rice

That particular day the riz gras happened to come with a piece of bitter eggplant, which has kind of grown on me, a piece of manioc, a piece of normal eggplant, and a hot pepper. Delicious!

Cadeaux!

Last week I got a lovely care package from my friend (and Senegal RPCV) Sarah K. (Thank you, Sarah!) 

It was filled with all sorts of fun things - Starbucks Via (which really is the crème de la crème of instant coffee packets), Clif and Luna bars (so good) and a nice mug (hot liquids in plastic cups = the worst).

Pumpkin Spice is Everywhere. 

I don't have all that much time left in Guinea (somehow it is December already) but it was still nice to get a package, and America really is excellent at making well-packaged, palatable, durable, portable food products - nothing like living without refrigeration to make a person really appreciate the usefulness of preservatives. 

Friday Fryday

At the end of each week, all the Peace Corps Volunteers who happen to be in Kankan have taken to getting together to cook dinner. Friday Fry-Day, as it is known both here and in Senegal, has definitely become a thing. The dinners started out relatively modestly, onion rings and cucumber salad and banana bread, but over the weeks we've gotten more ambitious. Egg rolls with sweet-and-sour sauce.  Chocolate-glazed donuts. Herb-roasted chicken with sweet potato fries and gravy. Pizza with fresh cheese and mushrooms and caramelized onions.  Southern fried chicken and Key lime pie. Soft pretzels. Cinnamon rolls. Apple cake. All delicious. All from scratch, or at least with minimal help from spices brought in from Conakry or America.

Last week Sarah J. spearheaded the effort to make samosas, served with a mint-laced cucumber-yogurt salad and a curried lentil dish that I can’t remember how to pronounce, much less spell. I baked apple cake and cinnamon rolls with cream cheese-style topping – the beauty of Double Dessert is that everyone gets to take leftovers home for breakfast. It’s a great bonding activity, a nice morale booster, and given our kitchen, it’s just plain impressive how well things turn out, most of the time, anyway.

Indian-Italian Potluck Night

The knives we have tend to be either maddeningly dull or jaggedly sharp, we only have one baking pan, we have several enormous pots, two tiny little pots, a selection of frying pans with wonky handles, and I've never seen a measuring spoon, but we estimate pretty well. The oven here is a step up from Senegal – the door stays closed by itself and the whole front isn't held together by baling wire, duct tape, and pure hope – but it doesn't heat evenly (not that you can really set it to a specific temperature) and you can’t use both of the functional burners while baking or the whole thing goes out with a loud and disconcerting WHOOMP. Most of the time there’s running water (for the time being, anyway) and the house recently acquired a mini-fridge that works when the power’s on, which is generally every other evening or so.

The most recent menu included fried cheese wedges with marinara sauce, cucumber salad, and pirogues with sautéed onions, followed by coffee cake crumble and sweet soft pretzels with creamy whipped cinnamon topping, and it was all delicious.

Pizza Party!

Yesterday was PCV Kenny's birthday and he, PCV Michelle and I all got together to celebrate with pizza from scratch and cake from a box. (Cake from a box is one of those things that I never really appreciated until I moved to West Africa. It tastes like America.) It's really nice to have other Americans around for birthdays, since birthdays aren't really a thing in Guinea. Many people here don't know their exact birth date, and people who do know the date don't generally attach any particular significance to it. Celebrating a birthday is so individualistic, I suppose that in many ways it's a very American thing to do. 

In any case, it was only the three of us because all the other volunteers are stuck in village for the time being - Guinea's long-delayed legislative elections are scheduled to happen next week, and so we're all on "standfast." (Basically, that means that no one's allowed to leave their site without direct permission from Peace Corps, so that they know where we all are and can stay in communication with everyone. When I was in Senegal during their elections it was the same deal, lots of text messages and no one was allowed to leave site unless they had some sort of emergency.) 

So, it was a small party but we had a good time. The pizza turned out really well, the cake was delicious, and the power was on, which was a real treat. We're really lucky to have sitemates - being on standfast really isn't so bad when you have PCV neighbors to hang out with and cakes to bake. 

Green on Green...

... is maybe what I should have called this blog. Oh, well.

The night before I left Conakry, the Peace Corps Guinea Country Director Julie (who has been extremely helpful so far) and her husband Paul (who's work extensively with Outward Bound) invited all the PCVs who were at Conakry office for one reason or another over for dinner. It was
delicious by any standard - black bean salsa and guacamole, cold beers and fresh lemonade, salad and lasagna, cake and cobbler - and I did my best to enjoy it, knowing that it would be my last such feast for some time

The next morning two PCVs, Shrey and Sara, and I started the two-day trek to Kankan. It was raining, but not too much, the road was rough, the car was good and the driver was fairly terrible, but we did manage to make it intact and with only one flat.

The scenery along the way was pretty much what had been described to me - lush, green, partially cloudy. The mountains in the middle of the country dwarfed the hills of southern Senegal, but aren't incredibly tall and the driver seemed to think that I was insufficiently awed by their grandeur -  according to Lonely Planet, Mount Nimba, Guinea's highest peak, measures only 1,752 m (5,748 ft), and it's hard not to compare that with California's Mount Shasta, which clocks in at 4,322 m (14,179 ft). They were very pretty mountains, though, and I was quite impressed by how impossibly verdant everything was.

On the second day (we spent the night in a hotel-type place a little over half-way) the landscape flattened out as we approached Kankan. It's in the Haute Region, where things are flat and open and green right now but will dry out once the rains stop. It definitely wasn't the worst drive I've ever been on - I had good company and regular stops at gas stations and vendor ladies - but I can't say that I'm going to be popping in to the Conakry office any more than I have to.

Waiting for the car to be ready on Day Two

The Cost of Living

It can take a little while to get a handle on how much money is worth and how much things should cost in a new place. I'm starting to get the hang of shopping here, but when I'm asking about prices at the market I'm still constantly converting Guinean francs (GNF) to Senegalese francs (XOF) and American dollars (USD), trying to infuse the numbers with some sort of sense of value. 

There are the official conversion rates... 

1.00 US dollar = 6,908.58 Guinean francs = 504.68 Senegalese francs

...and then there's the actual purchasing power; 6,900 GNF goes a lot farther in Guinea than 1.00 USD does in America. 

Here are some things that I bought yesterday:

                                     

Five small yellow bananas: 2,500 GNF
They turned out to have an odd, mouth-drying, sour residual aftertaste. I think I'll go with the bigger, greener ones next time. 

                                        

Two pieces of fried sweet potato with spicy stuff: 1,000 GNF
Hot and crispy and delicious.

                                             

Two bags of peanuts: 1,000 GNF; four eggs: 6,000 GNF; two tomatoes: 2,000 GNF; three onions: 1,000 GNF
I thought the peanuts were roasted and salted but they turned out to be sugared. Oh, well.

Big and small sheet: 50,000 GNF; three place-mats and a dishtowel: 20,000 GNF

Generally, things seem to be significantly cheaper than in Senegal, but for the most part the things being sold are the same - rice, dried fish, Goodwill clothes piles, greenish-yellow oranges, phone credit, mangoes, bread, palm oil, etc. There are a lot more avocados for sale here, too, and popcorn and lots of fried banana patties, which I'd almost never seen in Senegal.