A Smile Goes a Looooooooong Way

Hokay, so...last time I wrote I was in Mauritania, now I'm in Amsterdam. I wonder how many miles that is.... how did I get here unscathed? Answer: I try my hardest to speak to people in their own language and I smile A LOT. It's amazing how nice people are and how much more fun it is to travel when you smile at everyone.
Now, logistically, I rode from Nouachott to Agadir, Morocco in a truck carrying furniture with 3 french people and the Moroccan driver. It was a pretty good trip, although tiring because of the road or lack thereof, the heat, speaking French and attempting moroccan Arabic. I realized that I speak better French, but I can tell jokes/make people laugh better in Arabic. I guess that's because I learned my french in school and my Arabic from friends. They all made fun of me because I slept so much of the way, but hey, when the back is full of couches and Mom used to drive us around to make us go to sleep, I couldn't help it. Plus my eyes hurt from all the sand, so I had to close them, and by default I would fall asleep. So when I was awake, I stared at the vast stretch of desert, listened to Jay-Z and unsucessfully tried to make the French people laugh. I have yet to figure out French humor, but when I do, I will conquer the world. We stopped in Layounne, which is southern Morocco, northern Western Sahara (which isn't a country yet, but the problems between them are clamed down) at a friend's family's house. Luckily one of the girls had lived in Jordan, so we could get by in Jordanian/Palestinian Arabic together. The two girls took us to the Hammam (Turkish bath) and scrubbed sooooo much dirt off of us (the french girl and me). We had never felt so clean in our lives. Then we at couscous with our hands, which is kind of hard to do without having to just lick it off your hand, but we managed. Just trying won me a new Moroccan family to come visit whenever I want. The next day we continued on our way and made it to Agadir where I decided to continue straight to Tanger by overnight bus. I spent a nice day in Tanger by myself wandering around and caught the first ferry the next day to Spain. I met Elizabeth in Madrid and we spent about a week in Madrid, Valencia, Tarragona and Barcelona before flying to Amsterdam. Now we're staying at Alicia's (who I lived with in Nablus) house. We're planning to head to Prague in a couple days and then down to Greece to see Kristin and then to Italy for Elizabeth to catch her plane on the 14th.
So now that you've been updated, let's talk about trust and fear. When I think about how many people I have trusted with so many things part of me is amazed that nothing has gone wrong or gotten stolen or something and part of me thinks, of course nothing went wrong, people are trustworthy. So I would like to state my gratefulness for the luck I have had in my travels, but I would also like to make a big blanket statement that everyone is trustworthy. I know that's probably not true, but right now I feel like then benefit of the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you trust someone and they don't break it is well worth the slight risk that they will break it. Also, so you don't all worry that I'm handing my wallet and passport to people just to prove that they won't cheat me, I have learned fairly well how to trust people in a safe way. I do keep everything that is essential in my bag and keep it with me all the time and I trust myself more and more that I won't put myself in bad situations, but all this fear so many people have of strangers is not fair. You're a stranger to so many people and you would never hurt them or cheat them or steal from them, so why would it make sense to think that every stranger is dangerous? Maybe that's naive and tomorrow everything I have will get stolen and I'll become cynical, but right now I see things through rose-tinted glasses because people actually are rose colored and the glasses just look cute. :) That's all for now, I'll try to write more often! I love you all more then free breakfast at a cheap hostel and european coffee.
Love, Lisa

I get the news I need on the weather report...

Hello everyone!! Hope all is going well with you. I am writing from Nouachott, Mauritania, I'm still getting used to the Frech key board and I don't have much time left on my card, so I'll try to make it quick if that's possible. So, I arrived in Senegal after a long layover in Madrid on the 23rd of April. It was really good to see Irene and her older sister was there visiting too, so we had a good time. We spent a week in Dakar meeting Irene's friends, buying fabric for traditional dresses, speaking a lot of french, learning to cook the favorite senegalese meal and just hanging out and catching up on a year of news. Then we took a ferry (12 hours on the way there and 14 on the way back) down to the south of Senegal to a region called Casamance. It's really nice and relaxed down there. There was some political unrest a couple years ago so there aren't very many tourists and there are nice beaches and huge mangos. We came back up to Dakar and I left for northern Senegal (St. Louis) in the evening. I got to St. Louis at midnight and hadn't booked a hotel, so the woman next to whom I was squished for the whole ride offered to house me for the night and of course she fed me a big pile of meat and onions too. I got up at 6 this morning and made it to the border, rode the ferry across the Senegal river into Mauritania. Then I took another shared taxi to Nouachott; the capital where I ate lunch with one of the men from the taxi and his second wife. He's a Maribou, which is an Islamic religious leader here in Senegal and probably the rest of Western Africa. Technically his job is to pray for people, and provide a quranic school for young boys; but of course it's usually corrupt and the children end up begging on the streets all day and then have to give all the money to him. It's a pretty sad situation, especially because it has a religious guise. And now I'm staying at the Auberge Sahara in dusty dusty hot hot Nouachott. There's my update, and now I think I'll break it down into categories of bests.
Best food (the most important): I ate pork!!!! We were having a drink at a little restaurant by the river in Ziguinchor and as if she read my mind, the owner of the restaurant came out to talk to us and asked if we wanted to come back the next day to eat pork!! the 50 year old vegetarian chemical waste managment chemistry welch guy we had met earlier was disgusted by these three American girls getting so excited about pork; but I was not ashamed. We came back the next day and it tasted soooo good!!! Unfortunately; she didn't have applesauce; but it didn't matter.
Best Ride: The mini bus from some village (I forgot the name) to Elinkine was the last one of the day, so we all piled in. Everyone was sitting on everyone else's laps and there were chickens and babies and everything. After a few minutes we found out that everyone on the bus was actually from Ghana and they were coming to Elinkine to fish for hammer head sharks. We had a good time talking about Ghana and singing the national anthem and they invited us to go out on the boat for 5 days with them catching 20 foot long sharks at 2 in the morning. Unfortunately, we didn't have 5 days, but it would have been fun.
Best Animal: this one is hard because we saw lots of cute goats and pigglets and funny birds, but the best was a giant jelly fish stuck on the beach. It had two huge tentacles that were dark purplish red that looked like they could do some damage. I touched to top part and where I had a cut in my finger it started to sting and later my finger kind of swelled up and trobbed. Think it barely touching the non dangerous part did that what the whole thing could do if you encountered it in the water when he had his witts about him. oooo, it makes me shiver!!!!
Best Conversation: After dinner one day we were sitting around talking and one rasta guy from Mali who we had met earlier said that he wasn't going to send his kids to school because it's just a tool of old french colonial society. That got some people worked up and the cook and the hotel workers ended up sitting with us discussing the merits of traveling, using money and technology and speaking lots of languages vs. living in the bush growing/killing your own food and that stuff. It was kind of tiring because it was all in Fench and everyone was talking quickly; but it was really interesting. It fizzled out when we tried to explain the phrase don't throw the baby out with the bath water in French.
Best Drink: Bee Sap. A cross between hybiscus fowers and koolaid that they sell in old washed out break fluid jugs. Probably not a good idea; but it tastes so good.
Alright; that's all I can think of for now. Hope all is well and I send you all my love. Miss you all more than fixed prices and clean bathrooms!!
Love, Lisa