The Tourist Corner: Obvious and Curious Photos

One of the courses I am taking is called Seminar on Learning and Living and it’s a cool class. It’s a way for me to give context to my experience and begin to better understand how I learn and live in a different culture. We have different assignments ranging from talking to our cultural partner about local values to corresponding with someone back home about our experience. At the end of the course, we’ll have a collection of pieces that can show our personal growth. One of our recent assignments was obvious and curious photos. Our goal was to spend 2 hours in a neighborhood in Dakar and take photos of things falling in either of the two categories. While we were doing this, we were supposed to talk with people trying to get them to tell us what they saw and then after that, we were to meet with our cultural partner to discuss the groupings of our photos. Here are some of my findings!

Obvious Photos:

Here’s a photo of some of the graffiti that I see walking to school every day. The top part reads “Fight against Drugs”

 These are the car rapides that I avoid taking because I never seem to know where they are going. When I first came, I would have put them with the curious photos but now they are the norm.

 I have an obsession with animals especially goats it seems. This photo is of goats on the village because that’s normal. If I was a goat, I would also be on the beach, just chilling with my friends.

Curious Photos:

 

Goats on the beach- that’s obvious. Goats on top and under the car-that’s something else. As we were driving by this beach, we noticed that there were goats just chilling under the car, probably trying to keep cool while there were other goats on top of the car doing who know what? If they were trying to find some shade, they were doing it wrong.

I already knew that Obama was popular here but he’s so popular that his name is used to sell mattresses. I am not sure if that’s the brand name or if this specific store happens to have that sticker for this purpose.