Lovely afternoon at E's boss' house today. Let me call him "F." F.'s Senegalese wife, K., prepared a West African meal that we ate West African style. They rolled out thin mats on the living room floor, and all of us—E and me and F. and K. and their eight-year-old twin boys and another couple—sat on cushions and ate from large communal dishes with large spoons. The meal was rice with meat and sauce. The sauce had mustard and curry and cabbage and carrots, and the rice was broken rice, and the meat had been steamed to a tenderness such that it fell right off the bones, which were mixed in with the rice. Everything was aromatic with onions and garlic. A habanero pepper sat in the middle, was pushed around, avoided by some, discussed by all, broken with a spoon. Whenever the rice in front of me was dry, K. spooned more sauce on top.

Conversation was easy. Some time after we had stopped eating, someone cleared the dishes. K. unhurriedly picked grains of rice off the mat with her fingertip, collecting them in her cupped palm. One of the twins brought us snifters of a reddish-purple beverage, whose name sounded like "bissop." I think it was a kind of tea made from hibiscus flowers and spiced with cinnamon.

Next, K. brought out a bowl of clementine sections and bunches of grapes. There were some strawberries in the center, but her three-year-old had picked most of them out already.

Then the tart, which the other guests had brought from the bakery down the street.

Coffee was ready, but some of us waited for tea. It was green tea from China, but like our meal, it was served West African style: very strong, somewhat bitter, sweetened, with mint. It is served in tiny cups, but first the server pours the brewed tea from cup to cup to cup to cup, like a shell game of tea. Watching the thick cord of tea be poured and poured and poured again is hypnotic. Eventually—nothing, apparently, happens in a hurry in West Africa—the tea has cooled a little, and foamed. The cups are distributed. They are thimble-sized, but you drink a first cup, and a little while later a second cup, and sometime after that, a third cup.

During the tea-pouring and drinking, we talked of chocolate, so F. had to show us examples of the Ghanaian milk chocolate and high-cocoa-content chocolate he was talking about, and we had to open them up and taste them all.

And before we knew it, the afternoon had slipped away, and the sun was starting to set behind the cherry trees. Time to thank our hosts and head home.