Bamako!

Guess who got a free (sort of) trip to Bamako this week? Yeah, that's right, this girl. It started out pretty bad and now is turning out pretty boring, but bad and boring took a turn for the better this morning when I bought a GIANT BOX OF CHEERIOS at the supermarket, the likes of which I believe only exist in Bamako. And I got some bananas at the corner and it was like eating a little bowl of heaven. Cheerios, believe it or not, and Chex are the two foods I have dreamed of the most since I've come to Mali.
Well, I've actually written out several blog entries that I am hoping to post at some point, about my arrival to site and my adventures there and in Kita. But as I mentioned, I am in Bamako right now, and they are all in Kita. So I"ll have to do that later.
So you know how they (at least used to) say that if you are going to have a heart attack, you'd be well-advised to do it in Seattle? Well, I think I'm still going to choose Seattle for my heart attack, but for just general passing out, I would highly recommend Mali. They take extremely good care of you if you suddenly go belly-up in the streets of Bamako. Help you to a chair, sit you down, bring you some water, put the fan on you - very, very attentive. Of course, then you don't want to go back there, because you are embarrassed about being the girl that fainted on their sidewalk, and they may have the best ice cream in all of Bamako, so sometimes you just have to suck in up and do the hard thing, don't you?
Well, besides all that excitement, we've finally found some French tutors in Kita that speak real Frenchy-French that I can understand (all teeth present and accounted for) and they want to do an exchange, learn a little English, learn a little French. Very excited about that.
Well, actually, my i-pod is all charged up now, and quite honestly, that's why I came in here, so I'm going to go back to bed now. Have great day, everybody, and I'll post some other more interesting stuff some other time. (Like, for instance, my young girl cousin, Seli, which was very confusing to me because it also means just plain old pray, is the feast at the end of Ramadan, and it took place while I was in Behon (my village) and so I will share what I learned about that.) So until then, au revoir (a phrase which my host family will swear up and down a stack of Bibles, or rather, Korans, is English - absolutely refuse to believe it's French, think I'm dumb for thinking so. Of course they think I"m dumb for innumerable reasons, so what's one more in the great scheme of things?).