"L's" Galore

On the 9th of June 1934 Donald Duck mad his first film appearance, in The Wise Little Hen, a short film by Walt Disney. Fast forward 82 years later and you have the most stressful day, for me, of this whole trip. So I strolled into the lab some time between 8 and 9 o’clock. So I can start early on my experiments. I get to the lab, and when I want to start, I am basically swatted away as the custodians were cleaning. During this time I waited and spent some time reading the about local news and current affairs. After the custodians were done, I then had the chance to start. Now one of my biggest pet peeves is having inadequate tools to get a job done and in addition to my experience in a good amount of labs, you can understand why I had to go out a buy examination gloves because there were none in the whole lab. So after I obtained my gloves, I started my experiment.

My experiment involves using electrocoagulation to purify water. We do this my using crystal violet as our colorant and test the absorbance before and after the process with the spectrophotometer in the next room. Now in this other room, students do food research. And in an essence where there is food, there are often bugs, and there are plenty of bugs in this room. As I step into the room I see a huge cockroach looking bug crawl around the desk, and in my mind, I think, “For it to be this big, it must be eating well.” As I open the spectrophotometer I see little moving bugs in the machine and various ants marching around. Now I am not the one to be freaked out by a bug, but when bugs invade my personal space constantly, especially as I am trying to do a task like pipetting and diluting solutions, my patience wanes and frustration increases, especially when my hands are occupied and dirty. I often have to calm myself as fly’s and gnats constantly disrespect me by running into my face and irritating my very being by essentially being in my presence. I can imagine myself trying to rub my facial itches where the vermin disrespected me on my shoulders and limbs.

So as of now, I have already been annoyed in two different ways: dealing with inadequate equipment, and disrespect from insects.

So when I finish my initial experiment, I think to myself, “Nothing would make my happier then a good meal.” So I go to the cafeteria. I go and try to order and look at their list for available dishes. I ask for yassa poulet and they basically say, “Don’t have that.” I then ask for a steak sandwich and they reply, “Nope.” I then ask for a chicken sandwich and she simply shakes her head ans says all we have is Sandwich froid, which in essence is a liver sandwich. Now in my mind I think, “If you don’t have the food, why in the world would you place it on the menu!!!” But anyway I keep my cool and simply reply, “Nah you good, have a nice day.” And I leave. Luckily I had leftovers in my room back at the dorm so I went back there to have lunch. Now this Ramadan season has really messed with all our plans and it has made finding adequate food 10 times harder. Around 6:30 PM we decided to go to Medina, which is a part of Dakar that has one of our favorite restaurants; Restaurant le Gallard. So we get a taxi and pay 1000 CFA to go to the restaurant which we then find out is closed. We then go to a fast food place that was next door to get some food. I had a bad feeling about the place as soon as we entered. We walked in and there was confusion as to whether we should order at the register or go sit and from that point I started to feel like we were taking an L. The lady then gave us a menu, one menu. And then we asked for three more and she simply said they only have two, which made no sense to us because there were definitely more than two chairs. After that I ordered a Chicken Chwarma with fries. Fast forward maybe 10 to 15 minutes later and I got the most repulsive concoction I have ever tasted in the history of my life. Now I usually don’t complain about food, so if I think it was that bad, there were some serious issues that needed to be resolved. And I really tried to eat it, because I was basically starving, but I couldn’t force myself to eat it. At this point we started thinking of all the things we could do to get out of paying for the food. Rebecca suggested putting a hair in it, and I suggested running. But since we didn’t want to get trapped in a country we didn’t know the laws of, we simply told them we didn’t like it and paid for the garbage we received. As we paid, two interesting observations were made. The first one is that one of the guys that worked there didn’t throw away the food, he simply packed it up and took it behind the counter. It made me wonder if the food we got were leftover from someone else. The second observation was that a fly was flying inside the refrigeration/display unit that they kept ice cream in which didn’t make sense to me because I thought the whole point of the display was to allow people to see the ice cream without impurities entering it.

Sadly, the frustrations didn’t end there as we started negotiating with a taxi driver to take us to La Brioche. We negotiated the price to 1000 after he kept giving us random reasons as to why it should be 2000 CFA, mind you we don’t know much French so, it really sounded like gibberish to us. Fast-forward in time, he took us to the wrong Brioche, and when he finally took us to the correct spot he had the audacity to still charge us 2000. In my mind I picture us going 1980’s gangster and “turnin’ up on him” in order to get out of paying that fee but then I came back into reality, took the L, and gave him his cash and got some food.

Fast-forward in time, I was finally content with my adequate meal, my night time shower and then my slumber.

P.S. Good Wi-fi is still a pain in the patella

Total amount of “L’s” accumulated: 300 [Chief Keef Voice]