I feel like I really need a rest, but there's so much going on lately. Saturday night was the going-away party for the lovely Miss Hannah K. (She has a website too but seems to be a bit shy about it, so no link. If you know her it should be easy enough for you to find.) Our contribution was a case of beer and a big bowl of our new favorite artery-clogging goodness: West African Fried Chicken. I don't even LIKE fried chicken. I was a vegetarian in the US! But Saturday night you could hear gnawing and licking and other feeding-frenzy sounds as I clutched the bones in my greasy paws and made sure I didn't miss one morsel of juicy meat.

I probably don't want to know what they cook it in.

If I stay out past 11:30 or so, I usually get a second wind. Most people don't know this because when do I stay out past 11:30? Never, but Saturday I did, and I was easily lured from Hannah's party on to the jazz club Evasion, which is easily one of the coolest things I've done since I got to Bamako. First of all, we arrived after midnight, which is very cool. Secondly, it was a real hole-in-the-wall; around the corner is a lively scene in front of the Crystal Palace, but the jazz club is barely marked by a hand-painted sign. Inside, you walk down a long crooked hallway with jazz instruments painted on the walls, and you land in a smallish club, which is loud and dark and smoky. There are probably some pictures of it here but I don't have time to dig around find them right now. (Update: the band, the band again, a musician, guest singer, the treacherous railing-less spiral staircase to the roof.)

The music was fantastic. The place is called "the jazz club" but that doesn't do the music justice. The band played a melange of jazz and reggae and African styles. We sat in booths for a while but then we had to get up and dance; you can't sit still when that kind of music is playing. It's hard to leave, too, but we tore ourselves away at 2:00.

The only thing I didn't love about the club was that it was full of men. One of them literally reached around behind E's back to try to pick me up ("Didn't I see you at such-and-such a club the other night? Aren't you French?") and/or sell me a pair of earrings ("Just look! For the pleasure of your eyes!"). Times like that it's good to not speak much French ("Je n'ai pas compris! Desole!"). I wasn't uncomfortable at all, being with my husband and three or four other guys, but I don't think I would go back there with only women friends.

Anyway, we paid for all that coolness on Sunday. We slept well past our normal wake-up hour and stumbled down the street in the baking heat, to eat brunch at a friends' house and take a dip in the pool. Just what the doctor ordered.

Not to end on a weird note, but Josh told me yesterday that he heard a boat overturned in Koulikoro, one that had lots of people dancing on it, and that 40 people drowned. This rumor is as yet unconfirmed but we think it was the boat we toured on Tuesday. How many boat/nightclubs can there be in Koulikoro?

Update: The boat that we heard overturned in Koulikoro was not the one we toured. It was a pirogue, a much smaller boat, and supposedly 10 people drowned, not 40. Not good news, but better news than the original rumor.