Living the nightlife

Last night, I was literally out until dawn. I wasn't even totally committed to going out at all, but at 10PM when Spencer said he was going to join some friends at a bar across town, I let myself be convinced to come along, so long as he came to pick me up in his taxi. When we got to the bar, called the Flamboyant, we found that there was to be a musical act that night. It started out with a couple of drummers, a terrible synthesizer playing recorded xylophone songs, and a bored-looking guitarist twanging out riffs with too much distortion. Paul and Marie were there, as well as people I didn't know: Jamie, a young woman working on a poli sci dissertation, Hillary, who teaches at a Christian school, Jacob and Owen, a couple pilots for a gold mine, and Matt, a teacher at the American school. Eventually some women started singing and dancing around, which made the music slightly more interesting, but not too much. Here is a sample:



After a while of that, people decided to move to a different bar, so we packed up in Owen's Jeep and went to a place called the Kora, which had pretty delicious wood-fired pizza. Nothing like pizza at 2:30 in the morning. Owen was ready to go home at that point, and I could have myself, but other people were scheming up plans to go to No Stress, the club Kevin and I went to on New Year's Eve. I was on the fence, but allowed myself to be dragged along. After all, it is my last weekend in Mali. The club was pretty fun, when they played music I knew. I did a lot of dancing and others drank from a bottle of whisky, but whisky at 3 in the morning sounded like the grossest thing I could think of. So I just danced. We stayed there almost until it closed; when we went downstairs at 5:30 to go home, the sun was rising. I haven't stayed out that late in a very very long time, but I'm pretty glad I did. I had a good time.

I came back to SIL and crashed until 12:30, at which point I ate the rest of my peanut sauce for lunch, checked my e-mail, then went back to bed. Tonight it was cabbage rolls stuffed with curried ground beef (leftover stuffing from the meat pies), and I also made a big batch of hibiscus juice (which is really more like tea, since you boil the flowers). (Pictures of this latest culinary endeavor have been added to the last photo album.) Some Peace Corps people are going out tonight, but I just want to stay in and read my book. Now that the Satanic Verses is done, it's on to a second reading of A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I decided tonight that I want to be Bill Bryson when I grow up.

Here is another video of Douentza as well, views down the main road into town: