After Tabaski, I headed down to Bamako to spend Christmas with some friends. Warm weather and the pace of the big city snuffed out much of the holiday feel, but we celebrated christmas eve toasting wine and cheese cozily at our hotel. Even though Bamako offers 'real food' such as hamburgers and ice cream, we ate our Christmas dinner at an egg shack, and headed out to watch some live music. That's when it hit me. I spent the rest of christmas in the bathroom, humming carols.
3 comments:
question for you, mary... what are all of the wood posts sticking out of the buildings for? structural? decorative?
also, HI! and thanks for the letter... yours is on its way.
-ponti
I still haven't gotten to see them construct one of the mosques, but they tell me that the wood posts sticking out serve 3 purposes: first, they are structural, transfering the weight of the mud and allowing them to build much higher; second they serve as a sort of scaffolding to stand on while they're packing the mud on the upper parts; third they are left sticking out to prevent erosion of the mud during the rainy season. They also now have become part of the iconography of a mosque, somthing like a steeple on a church.
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