Man ak sama yaay, nungi dem Saly.

My mom landed in Dakar’s Leopold Sedar Senghor airport Friday morning around 1:00 and left Wednesday morning a little after 5:00. In between, she and I spent a chaotic day in Dakar (visiting Universite Cheikh Anta Diop and Marche HLM and my host family in Sacre-Coeur 3 and the best patisserie in the city) followed by four idyllic days in Saly, a beach resort town one to three hours south of Dakar (depending on traffic) and apparently the top tourist destination in Africa.

The four days I spent in Saly were without doubt the best four days I’ve had since arriving in Senegal. There were hot stand-up showers and melon served at every meal and toilet paper dispensers in each bathroom. There was also an idyllic beach and waiters proffering glasses of fruit juice and flowers and grass and palm trees. So I could recline on a chaise lounge under an thatched umbrella and read or do crossword puzzles or listen to music or just lounge and wonder why in Dakar doing nothing was stressful when doing nothing in Saly, I felt at peace.

When I felt less lethargic, my mom and I would takes walks on the beach, passing multicolored pirogues anchored beside white, modern boats and donkeys bearing seaweed on carts across the sand. Or we would play ping pong or she would swim laps or once I even joined a group doing water aerobics. Evenings we would watch Sherlock (a BBC TV show with which I’ve recently become obsessed) and search for apartments in Paris. On evening I even took a bubble bath.

Food at the hotel Palm Beach was a further delight. Meals were buffet-style, which meant that I could have four or five vegetables and potatoes or pasta and maybe, if there was room left on my plate, a bit of fish, already deboned. Then I would have a (small) portion of both creme caramel and chocolate mousse after both lunch and dinner, as well as three types of melon. Breakfast included crepes and bacon and mango juice and hot chocolate with real milk.

Until two days before leaving for Saly, I had been unaware that my host family would also be spending the weekend there and would in fact be staying at the same hotel. Had I known, I probably would have booked a different hotel. But as it turned out, apart from yelling my name and waving frantically each time they saw me, the kids left my mom and I alone. Still, the way my mom tells it, I was the hotel’s visiting rock star. My mom bumped into a little girl while she was swimming laps and when she surfaced to apologize, the girl asked her if she was the mother of Megane.

We were also beloved of the hotel staff as the pet Americans, as all the other guests either lived in Senegal (although few were Senegalese) or flew in from France. So many came directly from France that people working at the hotel kept giving my mom and I prices for items in euros and we had to keep saying that we only had CFA. Many of the vacationers who seemed to live in Senegal permanently were of Libyan origin, we were told by a member of staff, which clarifies why my mom overheard two men talking about a friend of theirs who was ‘a leader in the resistance’.

The unadulturatedly fantastic time I spent in Saly forced me to realize that I’ve been in denial these past few months about my feelings for Dakar. I keep saying I’m doing ok here, that everything’s ok. I’m just going through life. I’m dealing. But facing every hour with the mentality that I’ll just get through it and be done with it and then it’ll be over is not being ok. Being ok is neutral. What I’m experiencing is negative. What I’m trying to say is that spending the long weekend in Saly forced me to realize that I do not like Dakar. I dislike Dakar. I don’t hate it here. I worried I did when I almost cried as my mom and I left the Palm Beach hotel, but I don’t. I’d just rather not be here. That’s all.