Tanji!

A visit to the Tanji fish market has been on my to-do list since the day I heard it described as smelly and gross. I finally got my chance when I biked with the new trainees from their training villages to the beach. Unfortunately but understandably, the fish market's located in the opposite direction to the part of the beach we wanted to splash around in (and even so we still swam with floating fishes). 

I worried that "Hey, do you want to stop by the fish market on our way home? I hear it's smelly and gross!" wouldn't convince anyone, but luckily my host gave me a better excuse: to buy fish. Before I biked away she called out, "You're going to Tanji? Bring me back some fish!" 

"Hey, we need to stop by the market so I can buy fish for my host." Much more convincing. 

At first I didn't wonder about the blue color of the inside of the boat. I merely thought, "How beautiful and unusual, let me get my camera out." Now I'm thinking, "How nice that someone else thinks blue makes a beautiful color for a dilapidated boat. If I ever own a dilapidated boat I will paint the inside blue. A blue the same color as the water. Kind of  how the bottoms of some dolphins are white so that when viewed by predators from below, they're the same color as the sky. I'll bet it's the same for  the boat! Like, there are these huge swooping monster birds that attack fishing boats unless they're sufficiently camouflaged! I'll bet that's the reason..."
No, seriously, that's what I was thinking.

After the first minute, biking on the beach becomes no fun at all. Just a lot of work.

There is a windmill in the distance, but if you double-click on this photo to  enlarge it, I'm pretty sure all you'll see is a blur, because I've been reducing the size of the photos before uploading. So just believe me when I say there's a windmill in the distance. And next to the windmill there's a purple polka-dotted hippopotamus. 

This photo would be nicer without the garbage, or at least, the garbage should be more colorful. 

I asked these boys if I could take a picture of them and they said yes.
Two of the boys understood that I wanted a picture of them working and continued slicing  up fish.
One boy understood that I wanted a picture of them working but stopped what he was doing to give me a wide and crazy grin, like he's about to rip off a fish's head with his teeth.

I bought ten dalasis worth of fish for my host. I'd never bought fresh fish in Tanji before, and didn't realize just how many fish ten dalasis would buy. At site, ten dalasis will buy four dried fish. In Tanji, I was given a plastic bag with enough fish to fill a third of that green bucket. Or maybe only a fourth--I'm no good at estimating. Regardless, it was a lot of fish. More than one family without a refrigerator could hope to consume before they spoiled. I'm pretty sure they gave some away to the neighbors.

The women on the left got unexpectedly angry. I think they didn't want me to take a picture of them, so I tried explaining that I wasn't taking a picture of them, I was taking a picture of the net. Which was true, because if I were taking a picture of the circle of women, I wouldn't have left out half the circle. They didn't believe me, or didn't understand, or maybe they DID understand and were angry that I WASN'T taking a picture of them.  Then one of the women noticed I was speaking Pulaar, and decided to stop speaking Wolof, and she was a Bah so I said she was going to eat all the fish and then I walked away.