The Holiday Season

Once again I've fallen into bloggy laziness and haven't posted much lately. Here's the Cliffs Notes version of the past few weeks of my life.

After a long process of deliberating, browsing, and bargaining, I bought a car a couple weeks ago. Dealing with the paperwork, bureaucracy, and some of the personalities involved in this process was (and continues to be) frustrating, but the car gives me a lot more freedom and has so far been well worth the effort. My first weekend with the car I got pulled over (not for doing anything wrong, mind you) by the police and didn't have a shred of the necessary paperwork in the car with me: no drivers license, no registration, no proof of insurance or ownership. They harassed me for about 20 minutes or so but let me go after it became clear that I was in no rush and was willing to go to the police station with them to pay the actual fines rather than offer them something to let me go.

Last week I went to a conference on food tree species in Cotonou, Benin. The conference included a couple interesting and valuable (for me) presentations, but I wish I had had more time to see a little bit more of Cotonou. In any case, it was nice to have a brief change in scenery and food.

The holiday of Tabaski (a.k.a Eid ul-Adha, the Muslim festival of the sacrifice) occurs this week, along with Niger's "Republic Day", so we have most of the week off. Also, my little sister is coming to visit me so I'm planning to take all of next week off. One likely result of all this time off is that I probably won't be doing much blogging, although I'll try to post once and a while if I can. Maybe I can even convince my sister to contribute a little guest blogging.

Vendredi at Volume 5

The majority of my favorite African music comes from Mali, although I have no idea why this is the case. Although this song and video are about Senegal, the artists are Malian. They're a married couple named Amadou et Mariam, both of whom are blind. Some people may recognize in this song the influence of Manu Chao, who produced the album on which this song appeared: Dimanche a Bamako.