A taste of West Africa

I’ve discovered a delicious drink called bissap. It’s dried hibiscus flowers steeped in water, with heaps of sugar added, and served chilled. It's the color of cranberry juice and positively refreshing in this unrelenting heat. I tasted bissap with a twist the other night at a dinner with 20 native French-speakers in Bamako (needless to say, I was uncharacteristically quiet!). They combined ¾ bissap with ¼ ginger brew, where the ginger is grated and steeped in boiling water. The flavor is strong and tart but the ginger cuts the sweetness of the bissap perfectly.

Although it’s not mango season, I had been eating mango, papaya, and watermelon almost daily in Tanzania and then Senegal and Mali. There are piles of huge watermelons in markets by the road and artfully arranged oranges on carts. Bananas available everywhere, so they’re now rotating into my daily intake and I also snack on peanuts (cacahuetes) a lot. Traditional French breakfasts of bread with butter, apricot jam, and Nutella are served with coffee and and milk downstairs in the hotel restaurant, and the boulangeries in both Senegal and Mali display treats like fresh baguettes, pain au chocolat, and colorful fruit tarts. Fresh fish along the coastal regions, in both east and west Africa, is delicious. Brochettes de capitaine (capitaine is a local fish in the western region, it's like perch) is like a fish kebab – skewered chunks of white fish with green and red bell peppers and onions. It’s grilled and served with vegetables like green peas or cooked spinach, and rice.

Last night we went to dinner at a Lebanese restaurant that served up a feast. We waited outside for a taxi back to the hotel and a yellow Mercedes sedan (circa 1986) stopped in front of us. As it approached, I saw something sticking out of the trunk. A few days ago, I had seen a similar taxi carrying a motorbike in the trunk, so naturally, I was curious to see what this one was carrying. Turns out it was the car’s front bumper! So it goes.