Vive le Dash

We complain about travel in America.  We complain and we really, really shouldn't.  You don't know pain.  You know not suffering. You guys remember that time I had my host family kids stay with me?  Well when I took them back down south we all had to ride on the train.  Since I was buying their way, I bought us all second class tickets.  In the future, I'll choose jumping into a bear pit over this option.  It is an overnight train that is a minimum of 12 hours.  Do you know how second class works?  They just sell as many tickets as possible.  I'm not convinced there is any sort of limit.  We pushed and shoved our way through the eight second class cars looking for anywhere we could find space.  All the seats were taken.  People were laying on the floors beneath.  Even the connectors between cars were full.  There was only standing room in the aisles.  Some lovely humans scrunched up and provided we four with a single seat.  I gave it to the kids and sat on our lugg

Alright, it's about time I show you the folks I'm living with.  I may have explained to some of you that I live in a house in an enclosed compound.  My landlord has a few houses in the compound as well where he lives with his two wives and five kids.  Took me forever to figure out which kids actually belonged in the house though... and even longer to figure out their names. Here we go! Here's a group photo missing only the wives.  And one baby. The tall guy above (seriously like seven foot something) is Al-hadji Awal.  I introduce him as the king of the place.  Then myself as the prince.  He laughs off being king, but confirms my own royalty. OUMI!  She may be the most adorable thing in the world.  She was terrified of me for the longest time, but now she's learned to walk and regularly walks inside all on her own in the search for candies.  Oumi is probably not her real name, but that's all I've discovered so far. On the left we have t